About Athens

Getting Oriented

Athens Welcome Center (280 E. Dougherty St., 706-353-1820.) In addition to giving you all you need to know about Athens, the welcome center is a sight itself: it's housed in Athens' oldest surviving residence, the 1820s Church-Waddel-Brumby house. Home base for guided tours and a first stop for the visitor or newcomer, from general information and assistance to maps, brochures and souvenirs.

UGA Visitors Center (College Station Rd. & River Rd., 706-542-0842) Housed in the Four Towers building, a former dairy barn named for its four tall silos, this is a central station for tourists, visiting students and curious parents wanting to learn more about the University. This center provides maps, guided campus tours, and even virtual tours on touch-screen kiosks.

Athens Convention & Visitor's Bureau (300 N. Thomas St., 706-357-4430) A resource for all Athens visitors, including large meetings, conventions and those looking for group tours, the CVB can also get you a visitor's guide or bulk quantities of printed information.

Oconee County Welcome Center (22 N. Main St., Bldg. B, 706-769-5197) Located in Watkinsville, the small town just south of Athens, this welcome center recently moved and is now found behind the historic Eagle Tavern. Get info about Oconee County and surrounding areas here.

A Brief History

Athens is basically here because of the University of Georgia, which actually has a little bit of a feud with the University of North Carolina over which is the country's oldest state university. UGA, you see, was chartered in 1785 (four years before UNC), but Georgia didn't buy its land here in Athens until 1801, at which point Carolina had been holding classes for six years. The young state bought 63 acres here for $4000 that year. They'd finally wrested the land from the Creek Confederacy, whose warriors had fought bitterly off and on since 1786 for the area known as the Oconee Forks.

By the 1820s, Northeast Georgia had been settled, timbered and turned into cotton country, and Athens became a center for textile manufacturing. The remains of various mills and mill villages still largely define the city's landscape as it relates to the branches and tributaries of the Oconee River.

With commerce came the railroad, and, in 1841, the Georgia Railroad reached a terminus on Carr's Hill across the North Oconee River from downtown. It wasn't until the 1880s, however, that the railroad came all the way into town via a series of trestles, one of which was partly demolished in 2001 despite having been made famous on an R.E.M. album cover.

Clarke County saw very little action in the Civil War, but a factory still standing today as UGA's Chicopee Complex was the Cook & Brother armory, making rifles for Confederate soldiers. The city was also home to ardent secessionist T.R.R. Cobb, whose house was recently hauled back here from Stone Mountain Park and restored on a Hill Street lot not far from where it originally stood.

As the city grew and its first suburbs - now hip in-town neighborhoods - were built, electric streetcar lines were laid in the 1880s. Unfortunately, wherever they haven't been pulled up, those rails now lie beneath the pavement.

The University of Georgia was integrated in the early 1960s. Although there was civic unrest in town at the time, the process was by and large calmer and less headline-grabbing, than desegregation at some other Deep South universities. The late '60s and early '70s saw the integration of Clarke County's public elementary and high schools.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Athens' legendary music scene began to blossom, and is still going strong today. For a town its size, Athens has continued to create a wealth of musical history. To get a primer on what all went down where, pay a visit to www.flagpole.com/music/tour, a guide to a walking tour of local music history. The tour details former locations of key local clubs, venues that hosted seminal performances and other random places essential to a continually thriving music scene.

In 1991, after several unsuccessful attempts, the growing city of Athens and the smallest county in the state merged their governments. Hence the ubiquitous hyphen in our municipal government's official name: the Unified Government of Athens-Clarke County.

Since 1954, landlocked little Athens has been home to the U.S. Navy Supply Corps School. Federal directives, however, have the school slated to pack up and move to Newport, RI, in 2011. Plans are currently in place for the University of Georgia and the Medical College of Georgia to take over the nearly 60-acre campus, much of which was formerly the state Normal School - a teachers' college for women. That school gave its name to the adjacent neighborhood and commercial district of Normaltown.

The Folks in Charge

The Athens-Clarke County Government is by and large open and responsive - with plenty of volunteer opportunities to suit almost any citizen on various committees and boards - but it can take a while to get all the ins and outs of how things work. The ACC website at www.athensclarkecounty.com is a good place to start learning.

Guide to Services: For starters, check out "ACC from A to Z" at www.athensclarkecounty.com/guide.

Gov't Set-Up: Elected representatives are the mayor, one commissioner for each of eight different districts, and two "super-commissioners" whose districts each cover half the county. These 11 share power with an appointed professional manager who oversees the day-to-day business and the 1500+ staff in 39 departments.

Participate: The ACC website posts government meeting schedules, agendas, and even video (live and archived) of ACC Commission voting meetings and agenda-setting sessions. Agendas will give you the ground rules on making public comment; nearly all meetings are open to the public. Meetings are also broadcast on Charter cable's ACTV Channel 7.

Be Notified: Athens-Clarke has a "Neighborhood Notification Initiative" to keep you up-to-date on any building projects coming to your part of town. See www.accplanning.com.

Taxes: Sales taxes are at seven percent, a penny of which funds many public projects through SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax). Information on property taxes (and more) is on-line and searchable through the ACC Tax Assessor's office at www.qpublic.net/clarke.

Cops: In case of emergency, dial 9-1-1. Police headquarters are on the Eastside (on Lexington Road), but there are precincts and substations downtown, on Baxter Street, at Triangle Plaza in East Athens, and inside the Georgia Square Mall (on the west side of town). The downtown substation is home base for the bicycle cops you'll see patrolling downtown at all hours. Less-than-urgent code violations are handled by the Community Protection Division (it's sort of like the county marshal's office), reachable at 706-613-3790.

Help Out!

Hands On: It's easier than ever to do, because local non-profits have teamed up to offer the website www.handsonnortheastgeorgia.org. The site serves as a clearinghouse for ready volunteers and the organizations that need them - there are plenty in Athens! - with a handy calendar of upcoming and ongoing events. By phone, simply dial 2-1-1 or 706-353-1313.

Nuts & Bolts

Population: 101,489 by the 2000 Census; 109,204 by a 2006 local estimate. Rates of both home ownership and voter registration are around 40 percent.

Phone: Athens has required 10-digit dialing. Technically there are two area codes here, but the new 762 is still rare to nonexistent. Most local numbers are in area code 706.

Power: Georgia Power Co., 706-357-6000.

Water: ACC Public Utilities, 706-613-3500. A long-term drought restricts outdoor watering in Athens and throughout Georgia. Details are at www.accpublicutilities.com.

Natural Gas: Various local, regional and national companies are authorized to market gas in Georgia; a list is at www.psc.state.ga.us.

Garbage, etc.: Athens gets credit for leading the way with municipal recycling in Georgia; there are bin stations scattered around town and weekly curbside pick-up is coordinated by the ACC Solid Waste Department (706-613-3501, www.acc-recycle.org) inside the former city limits and by private companies in the rest of the county. ACC Recycling offers periodic events for properly disposing of household chemicals, fluorescent light bulbs, and even a scrap tire amnesty week. Trash pick-up is also weekly, and there's a less-frequent, rotating leaf-and-limb schedule. Mulch from those very leaves and limbs is for sale at the landfill on the county's eastern border.

License & Registration: The ACC Tag Office (706-613-3130) is at 3025 Lexington Rd., and registration is required within 30 days of moving here (some exceptions for students). The local Georgia Department of Drivers Services office (1505 Hwy. 29 N., 866-754-3687), next-door to the Georgia State Patrol, handles driver's licenses (also required within 30 days of moving to Georgia), Tuesday–Saturday. Some license renewals can be done on-line (www.dds.ga.gov).

Voter Registration: Voter registration forms are available at the Board of Elections Office (155 E. Washington St., 706-613-3150), ACC Library, ACC Tag Office, the DDS and on-line at www.sos.state.ga.us/elections.

Animals: There is a leash law in Clarke County, so keep your pets on a lead whenever they are outside of your yard. ACC Animal Control (706-613-3540, www.athensclarkecounty.com/animalcontrol) takes care of dog problems and always has dogs available for adoption, too. There are a handful of rescue groups in town, and the place to find cats and other small critters is the Athens Area Humane Society (706-353-CATS, www.athenshumanesociety.org) adoption center inside Pet Supplies "Plus" on Alps Road. Also, see "Adopt Me" each week in Flagpole to find pets looking for homes.

Rules of the Game...

... and other peculiar miscellanies to keep in mind:

Smoking: Prohibited at all hours in all indoor public spaces, and outdoors at county parks, too.

Drinking: Open containers are a no-no in the public right-of-way, so stay within the handy sidewalk café railings when downtown. (For that matter, open glass containers holding any beverage are prohibited in the public right-of-way, but this rule may not always be so strictly enforced.) This being Georgia, stores can't sell on Sundays, and bars are closed, but restaurants can pour. The rest of the week, package stores close at 11:30 p.m., and last call at bars is at 2 a.m.

Candid Cameras: The downtown area is under the watchful eye of the ACC PD 24-7. Oh, and there are two red-light cameras elsewhere in town, so drive carefully.

Bikes: Georgia law says bicycles have both the rights and the responsibilities of other vehicles on the road. In Athens-Clarke, riding (or skateboarding) on the sidewalk in the downtown area is outlawed. (Elsewhere, street or sidewalk: your pick.)

"No Cruising:" This applies to downtown streets from midnight to 4 a.m. Passing by the same spot in your car more than three times in an hour is a violation.

In the Yard: No parking in the yard (on an "unimproved surface"), no indoor furniture in the yard, no trash cans in the yard except on pick-up day... are some of the so-called "quality of life" ordinances.

Trees: Athens has had a tree ordinance since 2005. Learn the details at www.athenstrees.com.