He was everybody’s cousin. Nobody’s fool. And the richest 21-year-old in town. John Thrasher had been awarded a $25,000 contract to build a railroad embankment. Over the coming months, he would create a clearing in the forest, build several one-room, dirt-floor cabins for labor that he would soon hire and open up a general store so his workers could by supplies. His employer, the Monroe Railroad and Banking Company, was one of three railroad lines that would connect at the place where Thrasher was building his embankment. That “place” would become the City of Atlanta.
But in 1839, there was no Atlanta, and the area around John Thrasher’s store and his small community of Irish workers was simply referred to as Thrasherville. History would remember John Thrasher as one of Atlanta’s earliest pioneer settlers. It’s the story of the man they called “Cousin John,” on this week’s Stories of Atlanta.
