For years, Cobb County leaders worked to plan a massive stadium project and attract professional sports north of Atlanta. The site was close enough to the city that the stadium’s baseball team could plausibly tie itself to Atlanta. It was situated just over the Chattahoochee River, along a major highway, which was enough for Cobb County to claim the stadium as its own. The arrival of professional baseball in the area was heralded as a significant moment in the county’s history. New leadership in Atlanta, however, threatened the county’s grand plans, as the city’s latest mayor was a big believer in the power of baseball and in building a “Major League City.”1 As Atlanta tried to claim professional sports for itself, the Cobb County project eventually took a backseat. The grand Cobb stadium plan was shelved and forgotten. This suburban stadium is not today’s Truist Park, but an earlier, forgotten plan of the late 1950s. As white Atlantans moved to the suburbs, Cobb County Commissioner Herbert C. McCollum sought to attract them to his county with projects such as the stadium, a public country club, and an airport.
A little over half a century later, this odd saga gained new relevance. In 2017, SunTrust Park (now Truist Park) opened outside the Interstate 285 perimeter in Atlanta in the Cumberland Community Improvement District, four years after the new stadium was announced. The fact that it was in suburban Cobb County to the northwest of Atlanta, rather than in urban Fulton County, was a major point of contention. Safety was often cited as a key reason for the move. Mike Boyce, chairman of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, said that fans could visit the new stadium at any time “knowing you’re going to be safe, no matter where you parked your car.”2Critics of the project saw these concerns as a sign of suburban fears of Atlanta’s majority black population. Kevin Kruse, a professor of history from Princeton, told Sports Illustrated in 2019 that he viewed the “movement of the stadium as the culmination of white flight.”3 A quick Google search for the phrase “white flight stadium” brings up results about Truist Park. Lost in these debates is the story of how, at the start of white flight from Atlanta in the 1950s, Cobb County leaders attempted to bring a similar stadium to a nearby site. The story of this plan reveals how Atlanta’s suburban leaders tried to capitalize on the city’s boosterism and began to realize the new power suburbia could hold over Atlanta.