Inscribed with a few cryptic letters and numbers -- "W&A 00" on one side and "W&A138" on the other -- this modest granite obelisk is Atlanta's omphalos, its axis mundi, the ZERO MILE MARKER for the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Charles Rutheiser 1996. Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. New York: Verso. P.15

...Atlanta...Invisible...Accident...Random...Slogans...Testing Ground...Cities within Cities...Flows...Places...Quotes... Background

Railroads, not natural features or water-borne transport, built Atlanta. The Zero Mile Post -- the end of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, built south from Chattanooga in 1837 -- marked an unlikely site for a new city. Unlike America's other great railroad cities -- Chicago and Saint Louis -- Atlanta grew on a landlocked site at the intersection of half-forgotten mill roads and Indian trails, six miles from the nearest river and 250 miles from the nearest ocean. The site was convenient. It was on a RIDGE that sloped gently to the valleys below, allowing easy railroad building and easy connections to other planned rail lines to Savannah and Charleston. The railroad's chief engineer said the area around the Mile Post, then just called TERMINUS, "would be a good location for one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else. But a city grew anyway". For the railroad builders, Atlanta was a miscalculation. Atlanta is an accidental metropolis.

Atlanta Essay