What is now Flat Shoals Avenue was a major trade route for the Native Americans. It was called Sandtown Trail and connected the coastal area near Savannah with the Chattahoochee River.

Small farms and large plantations grew and the area’s many creeks were dammed to mill grain and lumber. The old Indian trail became know as the Flat Shoals Road, because…

Atlanta became a major supply hub of the southern war effort and consequently a major target of the northern war effort. Lemuel P. Grant designed the city’s fortifications to protect…

After the Civil War, East Atlanta recovered quickly becoming a developing unincorporated town – a suburb of Atlanta. Moreland Avenue was little more than a dirt path along the county line, while Flat shoals and Glenwood Avenues were the major highways…

The undeveloped center of the neighborhood was subdivided and developed by the Williams brothers who were born and raised in East Atlanta and had built a lumber and concrete business nearby on Glenwood Avenue. As the residential area boomed…

Twenty years after the first blockbusting integration in East Atlanta, the neighborhood remained integrated with a 60% black and 40% white/other racial mix. Property values had become depressed during the panic of transition, however, and slumlords allowed many houses to deteriorate…