Where is Vinings?

Where is Vinings?

I thought I used to know.

There were no limits that I can remember. Vinings just started about one place and ended about at another place. Roughly the starting point from Atlanta Road was sorta as you began to pass down the hill and saw where the black community people lived on both sides in poorly built small houses. Robinson’s Crossing at the tracks past the broom factory was “getting into Vinings.” You were past somewhere beyond Stillhouse Road, snaked up to highway 41, or the other way - crossing the Chattahoochee on the one lane bridge towards Buckhead.

There was no speed limits, train crossing arms, or lack of common sense respect for those on the street. Dogs ran loose, people watched from their porches and waved at our 1941 black Plymouth Coupe crammed with kids. There goes “Bub,” as my father was known.

He and my Uncle Howard lived with my grandparents in what is called the “Pace House” back in the 1920’s and 30’s, as tenants from the Jones who owned it then. They had all sorts of Mark Twainy style distractions which he passed on.

There were boy scouts on the mountain and a fire tower. We used to drive over watch the Chattahoochee at high water cover the plains along side the river, sometimes severe enough to engulf Robinson’s Tropical Garden and threaten to lap over the road.

There was always something quaint about Vinings, not only in just the name, but going back to stories about the Civil War; pavilion parties in reconstruction; mysteries of gold and Indians on the river; black magic and graveyards on the mountain. There was the sense there was more to history than was being told.

This was "Old Vinings.”

New Vinings is something vastly different and further afield. Never incorporated as such, there has been something retained of Vinings quaintness sufficient to have just about every suburban community, office, and shopping complex as far away as Kennasaw and Roswell to the north of Marietta, and along the river to the city limits of Atlanta - apply a non-patented reference of being associated with Vinings by name.

Even the marketing vernacular around Smyrna, the step-sister city to Marietta, is fond of using the term Smyrna/Vinings to apparently glean off the quaintness perception. The reverse has not necessarily been used.

Cumberland Mall area is not necessarily Vinings. Neither is the East/West Parkway. Office complexes on the mountain don't seem to use the name, perhaps in position to look past Vinings at Atlanta from not Vinings Mountain, but rather from Mt. Wilkerson - a change which still puzzles me.

It is not to suggest that one over rides the other.

Vinings continues to grudgingly absorb renewal and definition – much as it has in the past.