Hardwood Floor Polishing Service in Athens, Ga

Athens is a consolidated city-county in the U.S. state of Georgia. Downtown Athens lies more or less 70 miles (110 km) northeast of downtown Atlanta. The University of Georgia, the state's flagship public academic circles and an R1 research institution, is in Athens and contributed to its initial growth. In 1991, after a vote the preceding year, the native City of Athens unaided its charter to form a unified doling out with Clarke County, referred to jointly as Athens–Clarke County where it is the county seat.

As of 2021, the Athens-Clarke County's endorsed website's population of the consolidated city-county (all of Clarke County except Winterville and a part of Bogart) was 128,711. Athens is the sixth-most populous city in Georgia, and the principal city of the Athens metropolitan area, which had a 2020 population of 215,415, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan Athens is a component of the larger Atlanta–Athens–Clarke County–Sandy Springs Combined Statistical Area.

The city is dominated by a pervasive college town culture and music scene centered in downtown Athens, next to the University of Georgia's North Campus. Major music acts allied with Athens improve numerous alternative rock bands such as R.E.M., the B-52's, Widespread Panic, Drive-By Truckers, of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Harvey Milk. The city is pseudonym a recording site for such groups as the Atlanta-based Indigo Girls. The 2020 book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture describes Athens as the model of the indie culture of the 1980s.

In the late 18th century, a trading settlement on the banks of the Oconee River called Cedar Shoals stood where Athens is today. On January 27, 1785, the Georgia General Assembly granted a charter by Abraham Baldwin for the University of Georgia as the first state-supported university. Georgia's control of the Place was expected following the Oconee War. In 1801, a committee from the university's board of trustees selected a site for the university on a hill above Cedar Shoals, in what was then Jackson County. On July 25, 1801, John Milledge, one of the trustees and later bureaucrat of Georgia, bought 633 acres from Daniel Easley and donated it to the university. Milledge named the surrounding area Athens after the city that was house to the Platonic Academy of Plato and Aristotle in Classical Greece.

The first buildings on the University of Georgia campus were made from logs. The town grew as lots adjoining the university were sold to raise money for the extra construction of the school. By the epoch the first class graduated from the university in 1804, Athens consisted of three homes, three stores, and a few additional buildings facing Front Street, now known as Broad Street. Completed in 1806 and named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin College was the first enduring structure of the University of Georgia and the city of Athens. This brick building is now known as Old College.

Athens officially became a town in December 1806 past a admin made occurring of a three-member commission. The academic world and town continued to mount up with cotton mills fueling the industrial and advertisement development. Athens became known as the "Manchester of the South" after the city in England known for its mills. In 1833, a outfit of Athens businessmen led by James Camak, tired of their wagons getting grounded in the mud, built one of Georgia's first railroads, the Georgia, connecting Athens to Augusta by 1841, and to Marthasville (now Atlanta) by 1845. In the 1830s and 1840s, transportation developments and the growing disturb of the University of Georgia made Athens one of the state's most important cities as the Antebellum Period neared the top of its development. The academic world essentially created a chain greeting of mass in the community which developed upon its doorstep.

During the American Civil War, Athens became a significant supply middle when the New Orleans armory was relocated to what is now called the Chicopee building. Fortifications can nevertheless be found along parts of the North Oconee River surrounded by College Avenue and Oconee Street. In addition, Athens played a little part in the ill-fated "Stoneman Raid" when a warfare was fought upon a site overlooking the Middle Oconee River close what is now the old Macon Highway. A Confederate memorial that used to stand upon Broad Street near the University of Georgia Arch was removed the week of August 10, 2020.

During Reconstruction, Athens continued to grow. The form of government changed to a mayor-council organization with a extra city charter upon August 24, 1872, and Henry Beusse was elected as the first mayor of Athens. Beusse was instrumental in the city's rapid growth after the Civil War. After serving as mayor, he worked in the railroad industry and helped bring railroads to the region, creating buildup in many of the surrounding communities. Freed slaves moved to the city, where many were attracted by the further centers for education such as the Freedmen's Bureau. This extra population was served by three black newspapers: the Athens Blade, the Athens Clipper, and the Progressive Era.

In the 1880s, as Athens became more densely populated, city facilities and improvements were undertaken. The Athens Police Department was founded in 1881 and public schools opened in the slip of 1886. Telephone relieve was introduced in 1882 by the Bell Telephone Company. Transportation improvements were with introduced taking into consideration a street paving program initiation in 1885 and streetcars, pulled by mules, in 1888.

By the centennial in 1901, Athens had experienced a century of further and growth. A new city hall was completed in 1904. An African-American middle class and the professional class grew in this area the corner of Washington and Hull Streets, known as the "Hot Corner", where the Morton Building was build up in 1910. The theater at the Morton Building hosted movies and performances by black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington. In 1907, aviation pioneer Ben T. Epps became Georgia's first pilot upon a hill external town that would become the Athens-Ben Epps Airport.

The last, and perhaps only, lynching in Athens occurred on February 16, 1921, when a mob of 3,000 people attacked the Athens courthouse and carried off John Lee Eberhart. Eberhart had been arrested for the murder of his employer, Ida D. Lee, with a shotgun in Oconee County. That night, he was driven support to the Lee farm where a mock events was held. Though he refused to confess, he was tied to a stake and burned to death. The lynching usual widespread attention.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy built further buildings and paved runways to serve as a training faculty for naval pilots. In 1954, the U.S. Navy chose Athens as the site for the Navy Supply Corps school. The hypothetical was in Normaltown in the buildings of the old Normal School. It closed in 2011 under the Base Realignment and Closure process. The 56 acre site is now home to the Health Sciences Campus, which contains the University of Georgia/Medical College of Georgia Medical Partnership, the University of Georgia College of Public Health, and further health-related programs.

In 1961, Athens witnessed allowance of the civil rights pursuit when Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first two black students to enter the University of Georgia. Despite the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, the Athens–Clarke County university district remained segregated until 1964.