Is this true about Acworth? (Atlanta, Savannah: transplants, home, employment)
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Hi all,
I have been researching and reading just about every post on Acworth almost religiously for the past few months. My husband, 2 young kids (2 & 3.5), & I are planning on moving there in January. He will have a job in Marietta. We LOVE what we've read about Cobb County school district...that out of the 15,000 school districts in the country, it ranks #31. Also, from what I've read, it's more of a small-town southern kinda feel that we are really looking for. We currently live in Spokane, and I cannot stand the pretentious, self-centered people here. No one cares about anyone else. It's like a fight for survival everyday, with no one speaking to each other, letting each other over on the freeway, smiling & waving at each other...ugh.
Anyway, we have been saving up & have a nice moving fund, but nothing to really go & check out the area beforehand. My friend's husband was just stationed in Savannah, so they drove from Kansas to Savannah & drove through Acworth & Marietta for us, since she knows what I am looking for in a town. This is her email to me:
"So as far as the Acworth/Marietta area...I definitely did not get a small-town-homey-kind-of-feel. Sorry...maybe you would have! But I felt like the area was super congested and took soooo long to get anywhere. With it being so close to Atlanta, it was pure city all the way there. One thing that I did like about Acworth was there's a lake on the north side that was very pretty and would be a ton of fun."
That makes me pretty sad. Not once did I read anything like this. Is it true? I want a safe, quiet, southern area with a great school system, not a huge city feel. Thanks!
Hi all,
I have been researching and reading just about every post on Acworth almost religiously for the past few months. My husband, 2 young kids (2 & 3.5), & I are planning on moving there in January. He will have a job in Marietta. We LOVE what we've read about Cobb County school district...that out of the 15,000 school districts in the country, it ranks #31. Also, from what I've read, it's more of a small-town southern kinda feel that we are really looking for. We currently live in Spokane, and I cannot stand the pretentious, self-centered people here. No one cares about anyone else. It's like a fight for survival everyday, with no one speaking to each other, letting each other over on the freeway, smiling & waving at each other...ugh.
Anyway, we have been saving up & have a nice moving fund, but nothing to really go & check out the area beforehand. My friend's husband was just stationed in Savannah, so they drove from Kansas to Savannah & drove through Acworth & Marietta for us, since she knows what I am looking for in a town. This is her email to me:
"So as far as the Acworth/Marietta area...I definitely did not get a small-town-homey-kind-of-feel. Sorry...maybe you would have! But I felt like the area was super congested and took soooo long to get anywhere. With it being so close to Atlanta, it was pure city all the way there. One thing that I did like about Acworth was there's a lake on the north side that was very pretty and would be a ton of fun."
That makes me pretty sad. Not once did I read anything like this. Is it true? I want a safe, quiet, southern area with a great school system, not a huge city feel. Thanks!
Nope, I don't. I live in the West Cobb/Powder Springs area, and Mableton is pretty much on the other end of Cobb than Acworth is.
The scoop on "small town feels" in metro Atlanta to the OP: The fact is, you would be in a metro area of around 5.4 million people. There are plenty of places within that metro area that look like small towns or villages, but you're still in the shadow of one of the largest cities (metro wise) in the U.S.
Marietta Square has a small town look to it. As does Kennesaw and Acworth or Cartersville (outside of Cobb) or Roswell (also outside of Cobb). They all look nice and "down home-ish", but once again, you are still in a metro area of more than 5 million people. Those 5 million people are notorious for staying in their cars 12 hours a day drive here and there (and here again), and for living on opposite sides of the metro area that they work on. So pretty much any of these "small town looking" suburbs are going to have Atlanta's overall traffic/congestion as part of their makeup, along with certain amounts of other bigger-city spillover issues as well. The good side to it is that other than commuting to work, you can kind of create your own little biosphere type of environment in these subura-towns, and do a lot of your day-to-day errands, eating out, etc not far from home. The bad part of course, is that work commutes will be higher, and if you need to stray outside of your zone, poof, cars cars cars.
If you want to live in a smaller town where it looks AND feels like a real smaller town, you're going to need to migrate further outside of the city than where you're looking. To the point that your commute is going to be much longer to work.
I used to live in Spokane --back in the 90s, in the South Hill area across from Lincoln Park, if that means anything to you. I am in the West Cobb area, not far from AtlantaGreg now. I live just below Acworth and just west of Marietta. (My address actually lists "Marietta" as my city, but I'm in unincorporated Cobb county.)
What Greg says is true.. this is a major metropolitan area, and you're not going to get a true small southern town feel here. However, I think you're going to get much more of what you're looking for here than in Spokane. People here are friendly, much, much friendlier than the typical Washingtonians. If your husband's job is in Marietta, I'm not sure why you've picked Acworth as the place you definitely want to be. You could expand that to include Kennesaw and Marietta ... and even Dallas, if you want a true small town rural feel to where you live. (It's in Paudling County though, and the schools are not as good as those in Cobb.) I recommend you come out and look around for yourself before making up your mind about this place. I've lived all around the country, and the quality of life here for families is one of the absolute highest I've ever seen.
It's not quite sleepy rual southern, but it does have a southern feel to it ... and as you may know, southerners are definitely the friendliest Americans there are. People will wave. People will let you in on the freeway. People will take time to be kind, as they say down here. Even in heart of Atlanta, you'll encounter a much friendlier native population than you will in Spokane.
I live in Cobb County but even further south (Smyrna) - I don't know a great deal about Acworth except thatI would not necessarily consider it the most desirable areas of Cobb County.
Which area of Marietta will your husband be working in?
Your mistake is a common one. You may be moving to Acworth -- but you are really moving to Metro Atlanta. You will be part of a very large city
Also, you must check out individual schools -- not just a school system. While it is smart to check out the system, see DeKalb and Atlanta for why, within a large system will be a huge range of quality of schools. This is especially true in the South. While some of the schools in Paulding County may not be as good as some in Cobb, some may be better.
My dh, a second generation Southern transplant, has also been pining to move to the South, both to get back to his roots (his parents are about as Southern as Southern gets), and because he has some health issues that would benefit from living in a warmer climate. He would be happy most anywhere in the Southeast, but he talks about Metro Atlanta, largely because he fell in love with the area when we visited for a week about four years ago, and because he is a huge baseball fan and wants to be relatively near a MLB franchise, and, with the exception of southern FL, Atlanta has the only MLB team in the Southeast.
Sooo...we started looking at potential towns in the Metro Atlanta area and he felt that Acworth or Cartersville might be a good fit (assuming that we could find employment fairly near there); not too close, but not too far, KWIM? However, when I started doing some research, I quickly discovered that Acworth has grown by--are you ready for this?--48% in the past decade!!! Seriously, that is unreal!!! Very few towns in the U.S. could claim that kind of growth. Also, from when we spent a week in Atlanta about four years ago, I seem to remember that Acworth, being adjacent to one of the busiest major thoroughfares in the Atlanta Metro, I-75, had a lot of congestion and, at that time, new construction going on. The downtown had a quaint, small town look to it, but the overall vibe was rapidly growing, sprawling suburb and traffic, traffic, traffic. Cartersville, while a bit farther out, had the same vibe as well. It was very disappointing, but just the reality. A city can't have people flocking to it from all over the country for years and not have sprawl and outrageous growth, I guess.
I'm not actually on board with moving to the Atlanta Metro. Don't get me wrong, I love, love, love Atlanta and the state of Georgia...to visit. It's just that there is such an influx of Northern transplants there now that I'm afraid it would be like living in a busier, warmer version of what we have here in Michigan, so what would be the point, plus I am pretty happy here. I would move for my dh if he really wanted to and it would benefit him healthwise, but I'm afraid that I would almost feel guilty for being just another Northern transplant changing the fabric of what was once the true South. IDK why exactly, because thousands upon thousands of Southerners moved here to Michigan in the 20th century to work in the auto factories (my in-laws, to name two), and I have absolutely no problem with that and love them and what they have contributed to our culture up here. It seems funny to think of it this way, but I guess that the current influx of people moving from the "rust belt" states to the South is actually a reverse migration of what happened 50-80 years ago, so maybe a lot of them are just people like my dh, wanting to return to their Southern roots.
Last edited by canudigit; 05-02-2011 at 05:44 PM..
No, he just happens to like that area and its proximity to the lakes. We have income property up here and would like to do the same wherever we ended up moving to, but I am also an RN and he is a truck driver, so we could probably find employment more readily in most areas than people who work in fields that are less in demand, so that's a good thing.
School districts are not an issue at all. Our son is in college and our daughter only has one more year of high school to go, so we wouldn't move until they are both finished at their respective schools up here. We have elderly parents here who would never move at this point in their lives, so we also have to consider their needs first. It's ironic that my dh feels drawn to the South but his parents, who grew up there, don't, and consider Michigan their home now.
Last edited by canudigit; 05-02-2011 at 06:01 PM..
I would not worry about the Northern transplants - yes they exist and in some place more than others but as a general rule they are not ruining the South.
Have you considered somewhere like Newnan, GA?
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