Atlanta is located in the northwestern part of Georgia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, southeast of the Chattahoochee River. Atlanta is Georgia’s largest city and the main transportation centre of the southeastern United States. The city itself is relatively small but is surrounded by a multitude of suburbs accounting for over 5 million inhabitants in the metro area.

In 1821 settlers came into former Creek Indian lands it would eventually become metropolitan Atlanta. Atlanta was founded in 1837, the city was chosen as the site for a new railroad terminal connecting Georgia with Chattanooga, TN and west to the Chattahoochee and Tennessee Rivers.

The city was dubbed “Terminus,” and the termination point is now Five Points in downtown Atlanta. By 1842, the settlement at the Terminus had six buildings and 30 residents.
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Georgia became a U.S. state on January 2, 1788, as the 4th state, Gen. James Oglethorpe established the first permanent settlement in Georgia in 1733. Georgia’s first European visitors may have been Spanish explorers who moved inland from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Georgia was founded in 1732, it included much of the states of Alabama and Mississippi. In 1742, Oglethorpe defeated Spanish invaders in the Battle of Bloody Marsh. The colony differed from all others also in prohibiting slavery and the importation of intoxicating liquors.

Georgia’s early economy was based on the slave-plantation system. Georgia was one of the first states to secede from the Union in 1861, strongly supported the Confederate. During the US civil was the Union general William T. Sherman burned Atlanta and destroyed a 60-mile-wide path to the coast, where he later captured Savannah in 1864. During the war years, Georgia lost nearly 120,000 men.
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