Historic Resources of Douglas County, Georgia
The Losing Georgia Project presents the Historic Resources of Douglas County, Georgia, a collection of over 780 historical structures that were initially documented in 1999 and 2000. The surveys were by historic preservation consultants, QuatreFoil Consulting, by the Douglas County government and later by the City of Douglasville.
The first historic resource survey was done in 1999 for Douglas County, which also incorporated the resources of Lithia Springs, a former municipality and historic tourist attraction in the late 1890s. A year later the City of Douglasville had a survey created that included resources prior to the 1950s, primarily indicating the historic downtown area, residential homes and commercial areas.
This is the first time that data associated with any state of Georgia historic resource survey has been displayed for public use via Google Earth. The tour was created voluntarily over a month’s time that goes on to illustrate not only a historical glimpse of Douglas County, but further demonstrates the inherent losses of some historic resources that have occurred in the past seven years after which the surveys were completed.
The documentation effort consisted of comparing street addresses from the historic surveys to Douglas County property records. Before plotting any resources in Google Earth, aerial photography of a physical location was compared using Flash Earth, TerraServer-USA, and Microsoft Live Maps.
There were times where street address did not correspond to property records, therefore Google Maps was used to locate a general area – usually in cases where small tracts of property had been converged into one large tract. In some cases resources had ambiguous street address, i.e. House on Connors Road, which inhibited the documentation process, not allowing these structures to be located.
Losing Georgia’s findings include that of the 783 resources that comprise the surveys, 659 are active, 4 are in ruins, and 54 have been displaced with the remaining 66 resources having ambiguous physical location data which could not be displayed. Individual findings are available in the table below.
| Total | Active | Ruins | Displaced | Ambigous | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Douglas County | 346 | 275 | 3 | 43 | 25 |
| Lithia Springs | 87 | 75 | 1 | 7 | 4 |
| City of Douglasville | 350 | 309 | 0 | 4 | 37 |
Actively standing structures are identified by the standard globe icon, structures that are in ruins are blue globe icons, and no long existing structures are represented by a red globe icon. Due to the large magnitude of this historic resource project and the extensive voluntary time involved, photographs are not included in the initial release of the tour.
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