From the archive: the 1927 survey

People are often surprised that we have an archive. It is one document box.

In 1927 a group calling itself the Georgia Ropeway Association was organized in Atlanta to advance an aerial ropeway along the belt corridor. Its surviving papers identify one officer, an engineer named Marion T. Skelton, formerly of the engineering department of the Georgia Railway & Power Company. That company ceased to exist the same year, absorbed into the newly formed Georgia Power in a consolidation that took in most of the electric utilities in the state.

The best thing in the box is Item 1, a bound survey notebook of ninety-six pages, in pencil, in one hand throughout. Skelton walked the corridor. He recorded grades, span lengths, and the height of trees. He notes on one page that a section was impassable because of dogs.

There is also a photograph: three men with a theodolite on a railway embankment, nobody identified on the back. One of them is presumably him. We have no way to know which.

None of this makes our case for us. A survey from 1927 tells you what was possible with 1927 equipment and nothing about what is possible now. We publish it because it is the first time anybody proposed running a cable over this corridor, and because the work was competent and nobody has looked at it in ninety-nine years.

Skelton left Atlanta in 1931. The Association is not known to have met after that year. The collection inventory is published in full, including the three items the inventory lists that were not in the box when it reached us.