Marietta Before Our Time

This picture looks like it was taken from the top of Groover's Hardware (now Tommy's Sandwiches) or from a window in the upper office space next door. This is the South East Part of the Marietta Square, downtown, probably in the late 1920s.

Glover Park is dead ahead. In its future the park is full of drunks and soapbox preachers, then renovation and landscaping comes into play to make it look more like what it should have looked like when this picture was taken.

On the left at the corner of Atlanta and South Park Square is a drugstore. If it wasn’t already it would become Reynolds & Ferrell Drugstore. I remember their counter service did well with ice cream. In the 40s our family used to love to park out front and eat our ice cream and watch people come in and buy their ice cream cones, all dressed in their Sunday’s finest.

See the cars? They all look alike don’t they?

See the street car tracks? That is proof streetcars were a way of life around here at one time.

Also see the barrel in the middle of the street? I suppose the barrel was to direct traffic. If you drove on the left of it you were on the wrong side. I think a barrel was there off and on when I was a street-kid. I kept imagining a high speed auto chase between cops and robbers and both parties driving by the barrel at high speed and causing it to spin and just when it quit wobbling and settled down the robbers fled by again with the cops right behind them coming from the opposite direction causing it to spin again. I watched too many Saturday morning cartoons at The Strand.