Q: I’m curious to know why the name Druid Hills was attached to the area known by that name. I’ve tried to locate references to the origin, but haven’t found anything online.
—KC Burgess Yakemovic, Atlanta
A: There were plenty of suggestions – good, bad and just plain awful — for the Atlanta community with narrow lanes, green parks and grand homes that we all know as Druid Hills.
There were 39 of them, to be exact, and it seems that the men behind the development had trouble making a decision. Somebody wanted to call it Stratford, which would have been an immensely better choice than Newtown, Palos Altos, Bonnybrae and Valhalla, all of which were on the list.
Someone in the process had a serious thing for words that end in “wood,” because Brightwood, Goodwood, Midwood, Florawood, Inwood and Homewood were there. And that doesn’t even count Woods of Arden. I can understand why Monticello and Mt. Vernon were included, given their place in our nation’s history, and even Vernonchase, but I think Atlantans would have rioted had the area been called New Dorp.
Seriously?
Yep, that was perhaps the worst name in that 1904 letter from John Charles Olmsted – the stepson of the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted — to Atlanta businessman Joel Hurt.
Nicole Carmolingo, an archivist at the DeKalb History Center, emailed me a copy of the letter in which Olmsted states his case for having just one name for the new neighborhood and agrees that Stratford would be a “good name so far as sound is concerned.”
But buried on the list was the name that would end up being attached to the area: Druidhills.
That’s right. One word.
The Olmsteds had designed a park in Baltimore called Druid Hill – it’s still there – and liked the name, according to a 1986 AJC article. Hurt, the article states, finally picked Druid Hills. A fine choice, especially when compared to Braehurst or Homethorpe or even Battleboro.
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