From Pickneyville to Peachtree Corners, it's a community with a rich past

Many people bemoan the fact that the South lacks history. People assume that General Sherman burned what was important and all that he didn’t was uninhabited or unimportant to begin with.

Currently, the majority of area residents were born somewhere else, somewhere where their history is marked out with a green sign and cared for by Park Rangers. Not so here, there are no green signs brought to us by the Daughters of American Revolution to point out an area that is of "historical importance."

The history of Peachtree Corners is found in books and in the stories of older residents. It may surprise residents of Peachtree Corners to learn that their area is older than Gwinnett County itself.

Gwinnett County was formed in 1818 out of the non-settled wilderness in the south of the county and the settled areas of the north, which used to be called Jackson County. Pre 1818 all of the southern area of what would be Gwinnett County was Creek and Cherokee Indian Territory where it was illegal for white families to settle.

Of course, what’s a little illegality to settlers when there is money to be made off trading with the natives, right? So there were several families of white squatters in the area well before the county was incepted.

One illegal immigrant’s family name has become synonymous with Peachtree Corners, Isham Medlock, of Medlock Bridge Road, was born in Virginia in 1777 and was one the areas first pioneers. The Medlock family has lived in the area ever since and has become the most well-known family in Peachtree Corners.

In the early 1800s a road was built along an Indian trail from Hog Mountain in Buford to where Atlanta would eventually be built, this road was called Peachtree Road but is currently called South Old Peachtree.

A small community originally called Turkey Gizzard, later, Pinckneyville and now Peachtree Corners, grew up along that road. In a 1997 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article Harold Medlock, descendant of Isham Medlock said, “It’s believed that the majority of settlers had migrated from South Carolina.”  

The name “Pinckneyville” was chosen to honor a South Carolina diplomat and Revolutionary War veteran by the name of Pinckney, but which one?  According to Alice McCabe, a volunteer at the Gwinnett Historical Society, there is some debate over which Pinckney of the Pinckney family the area was named after, Thomas, Charles or Charles Cotesworth.  Some say Thomas Pinckney was the Pinckney family member who visited the area, making such an impression they named the town after him. Some say the one who left the impression was Charles Cotesworth, or even Charles Pinckney himself. While the debate goes on in certain groups, we know that Pinckneyville was named after one, perhaps all, of the members of the Pinckney family.

Pinckneyville was a bustling area in the early 1800s. In 1827 the second school in Gwinnett County was founded on what is now Spalding Drive. The Washington Academy, where Shiloh Baptist Church stands today, had an attendance of 72 males and 31 females in 1835 according to “The History of Gwinnett County,” quite an attendance given the sparse population at that time.

The area was also home to a post office, saloon, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop and the Hunnicut, or Pinckneyville Inn, which stood on a stage coach road that ran from Savannah, through Augusta, to the west.

The prosperity of Pinckneyville was to be short-lived however. In 1870 a railroad was built through the area of Norcross which made it the dominate community in the area. Due to the heavy trading that could be done via the rail road many residents moved from Pinckneyville into the town of Norcross.

The businesses followed the migration and soon Pinckneyville was again the quiet farming community it had been in the past. It took over 100 years for Pinckneyville again to see the kind of population and business boom it had seen in the 1800s.

 In the late 1960s Paul Duke pitched an idea for a planned community in the area of Pinckneyville, now called Peachtree Corners. He envisioned a place where people could live and work in the same area, thus diminishing the need for long commutes.

He developed the business area called Technology Park which would bring high technology jobs into the area. In the mid 1970s land developer Jim Cowart began to build on Duke’s idea with the neighborhoods of Peachtree Station, River Station and others. In the 30-odd years since the inception of Peachtree Corners, the population has skyrocketed with an estimated current total of 34,000.

The area bustles again, albeit under another new name. Once there was a blacksmith’s shop, now there is The Forum; once there was the traffic of the stage coach road, now there is the traffic of 141; once there was The Washington Academy, now there is Norcross, Pinckneyville, Wesleyan, Simpson and Peachtree schools. Once there was a community, now there is again.