Mega-development: 3,700-acre plan brought city-style growth to county.
By CHRISTOPHER QUINN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Deer Run subdivision in Woodstock is part of the Towne Lake community, which opened the door to large-scale development in Cherokee County.
Bruce Smith looked over the first foundations coming out of the ground in his Eagle Watch subdivision in Cherokee County 15 years ago and wondered if he had made a career-ending mistake.
"I thought I had really done it this time. I actually thought this is going to be my swan song," recalled Smith, who was, at the time, the general manager of Arvida, a home-building company.
Smith, now the president of Cousins Properties land division, continued, "Anytime you go into a market that hasn't had development, you don't know how the market is going to receive it."
The market was Cherokee County, a rural expanse 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta. At that time, some thought it too far out to attract the thousands of new homeowners expected to populate a massive new planned community headed off the drawing board and out of the ground.
Smith had signed up to to build 1,300 homes in Eagle Watch, and it was just one neighborhood among many in an ambitious master plan calling for 3,700 acres of homes, apartments, offices and shopping centers to be called Towne Lake.
Initial plans had called for more than 12,000 new homes when the project was built out, though that was scaled back to fewer than 8,000. Before Towne Lake, a big subdivision in the county was 50 to 100 homes.
No one Smith knew had tried anything this size outside of Peachtree City, a planned community of more than 10,000 acres south of Atlanta in Fayette County.
But he had been sold on the plan by Larry Johnson, a Texas developer who had put the land and the plan together and began drafting Georgia developers to buy in the mid-1980s.
Along with Smith, Al Means of Means Brothers, an Atlanta development firm, got interested.
Means remembers flying over the raw land to take a look. It had no roads, no sewers and no county water. The topography was hilly and rocky. County planners wanted the developers, not the county or state, to build Towne Lake Parkway, a four-lane thoroughfare into the area.
"A lot of things were not in our favor," Means recalled.
But a few things were.
A new interstate -- a traditional metro Atlanta growth generator -- passed right by the wide-open property, and the banging of hammers and the buzz of saws from just across the county line in fast-growing Cobb were almost audible.
Some Cherokee leaders, if not residents, were eager for the growth to move on in.
Hollis Lathem, a banker and then head of the Cherokee County Water and Sewerage Authority, came up with a plan to build the needed water and sewer infrastructure and pay for it with fees generated from the new homes that would be built.
Lathem, who later became County Commission chairman, said he saw Towne Lake as Cherokee's "opportunity to come into the 20th century."
The development was going to offer metro Atlantans something just coming into vogue, country-club-style amenities without the country club price.
Eagle Watch was to be built around a public golf course designed by Arnold Palmer. It and the other neighborhoods would offer swimming pools, tennis clubs and courts, wooded lots that backed up to Lake Allatoona, playgrounds, basketball courts and interconnecting sidewalks. Homes could be had for less than $150,000.
Atlantans and those moving in from other states put Smith's fears to rest as soon as the first home in Eagle Watch was finished and sold in 1998. They came. They saw. They bought more than 200 houses a year during the peak of activity.
Means Brothers eventually built about 1,400 homes and a large portion of the commercial development along Towne Lake Parkway.
Gene Hobgood, then sole commissioner in Cherokee County, said the megasubdivisions that followed Towne Lake into Cherokee County, such as BridgeMill, Bradshaw Farm and Woodmont, followed Towne Lake's pattern. They are massive, well planned and offer similar amenities.
He said he never doubted that Towne Lake would place Cherokee County within the suburban ring circling metro Atlanta.
"I knew people wanted to live here. People kept coming. It was out a little bit, but you could get more house for your dollar, and taxes were lower, and traffic wasn't what it is now on I-575."
Lathem, a native of Cherokee County, recalled that he recognized that growth was coming, like it or not. Towne Lake offered one large uniform plan, rather than the hodgepodge of qualities and styles that would have resulted if the 3,700 acres had been developed by different companies.
"It was an opportunity I felt like we didn't want to miss," he said. "It was going to bring new commercial development. It was going to increase the tax digest tremendously at no cost to the county."
Hobgood persuaded the developers to pay for construction of Towne Lake Parkway and donate land for a new school, library and park, now named Hobgood Park.
The rapid growth in Cherokee that followed Towne Lake also introduced the county to the problems of blending rural Georgians and metropolitan Atlanta.
Median household income jumped 66 percent, from $48,492 to $80,486, between 1980 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Big box commercial development, restaurants, video stores and gas stations followed the money. Shopping centers sprang up on Towne Lake thoroughfares, relieving residents from long drives into Cobb County but also creating new traffic problems and filling night skies with light.
The Towne Lake area shot up from 7,156 residents to 33,120, creating a new power base away from the county seat, Canton. Two-thirds of those new residents moved in from another state or a foreign country, throwing new perspectives, energy and disagreements into local politics that continue to this day as the county builds its new identity.
