Author: Chris

Wall of Shame – 1058 Arnold Mill Rd

Chris

Let’s talk about that 15.6 acre piece of land that sits right next to Laural Brooke Neighborhood at the corner of Arnold Mill Road and Grimes Road. You know the one:

We all pass it whenever we need to head to Hickory Flat, or Roswell, or maybe to get some items up at the dollar store. It’s a peculiar road that looks like a private drive rather than a public road (although it doesn’t appear to be marked as a private road anywhere). Whatever it is considered now, it wasn’t a private road pre-2002. It was known as Rucker Lane, and it used to lead to no less than 4 homes along a path leading to the Little River.

It’s an interesting property with what appears to be at least two houses and two barns/garages. The rest of the land is wooded and undeveloped. It backs up to the former reservoir in Laurel Brooke on the west, and homes to the south. On the east side of the property is a 50+ acre piece of property owned by what I believe is a Chinese holding company. That’s for another wall of shame post!

So why am I putting this one on the wall of shame? Well, it’s another property owner hoarding land in an effort to try to get a neighborhood development company to pay a premium price to buy it. The property is owned by a woman named Carol V. Clark, a real estate attorney. Imagine that. Appears that she bought the property from a woman named Ruth Marsh in October of 2004. Well, she didn’t buy it from Ruth directly. Ruth passed away in 2003, so Carol swooped in to pick up the property from her estate/executrix.

This happens all over our area. Old homes get bought out after an elderly person dies, and then the new owner just sits on it for years (sometimes decades) and lets the property deteriorate until its a pile of rubble (or it burns down like 13725 Arnold Mill Rd just did).

I can’t say that Carol has done this entirely, as I do see evidence of vehicles in the driveway over the years. But that all seemed to stop sometime after 2019. I don’t believe Carol was actually living there all this time (she doesn’t seem like the type to live in an old farm home), but it’s possible she was renting it out to make more money on the place.

So what happened after 2019. Well, COVID hit, lockdowns, and then suddenly the housing market started to skyrocket. Carol’s in real estate…perfect time to put it on the market and cash in!

So what does she do? Lists it at this insanely ridiculous price of $2.337 million. Way above the average price per acre for our area. She kept pulling the listing and relisting it multiple times over the years, switching agents and listing services. Then after it had already been on the market for over 2.5 years without a sale (maybe one pending that fell through), most people would lower the price to hopefully make it sell. But no, she RAISES the price! $2.375 million now.

“Perfect for a new home neighborhood! This development opportunity could be subdivision for approximately 25 new homes! A beautifully wooded tract of over 15 acres awaits your development desires.“

She keeps listing it as “land” because she only sees it as a neighborhood development opportunity, but there is very clearly a historic home (allegedly built in 1860) on this property. If that’s accurate, it was built only 28 years after the McConnell-Chadwick Homestead which has a historical marker plaque.

I’m only able to go back as far as 1938 with aerial imagery. You can clearly see in this photo that property was a huge farm with lots of cleared out land for livestock/farming.

But sure…go ahead and wipe out more Cherokee County history so you can make a buck and we can get another giant subdivision to flood our 2-lane roads with cars. Shame!

Wall of Shame – Chadwick

Chris

I’m thinking about starting up a property owner “wall of shame” for the areas surrounding my neighborhood. For the people / holding companies that own properties or homes that are just sitting around rotting away due to abandonment. These owners pretty much just seem to be waiting around for that big payout from a neighborhood development or a commercial purchase. Meanwhile their properties are complete eyesores all along stretches of road we travel every day.

The old house at 13725 Arnold Mill Road just burned down this week. It had been abandoned for at least 12 years, and was built in 1941 making it 83 years old before it went up in flames.

I looked into the owner of this property and I’m not surprised. Owned by Larry Chadwick. The Chadwick family has owned pieces of property all over the place south of the Little River for many decades. They used to have a general store and hardware store across the street from the house. Funny enough, the hardware store also burned down sometime around 2010 leaving the older general store still standing. It was most recently used as a military surplus store, but even that has left and now it’s abandoned.

There’s various other properties that the Chadwick family owns all up and down this stretch of Arnold Mill Road / SR-140. Many of them along the road are either abandoned, burned down, or just sitting in limbo and rotting away. I get that at one time the Chadwicks were amazing folks with great things to offer the Arnold area, but these days it looks like they’re just land-hoarders. Take for example the historic McConnell-Chadwick Homestead.

Larry Chadwick also owns this property, which is so old that it has its own historical marker. Built around 1832, the original portion of the house is 192 years old! You’d think that since it was one of the very first homes ever built in the original Cherokee County that Larry and the Chadwicks would do something to protect it and preserve it. Nope! Just look at it. I’m surprised it’s still standing. I hear there’s some efforts by the city of Milton to put some money into restoring the house. Sounds to me like the Chadwicks are just waiting around for that free handout from the city so they can get a nice tourist attraction and increased property value out of the deal.

Chadwick family… you all would be the first on my wall of shame for the growing collection of blight you have around the Arnold Mill community. Broken down BBQ restaurant, burned down home, abandoned general store, a dilapitated historic home… plus more! It’s fitting that the landfill behind these properties adopted your name. An eyesore backdrop for the property collection. The most amusing part is even THAT property is also now closed and being abandoned!

Laurel Brooke Timeline

Chris

I’m finally starting to publish some of my Laurel Brooke land ownership timeline information on this site. I had recorded a lot of it in a document a few years back, but always intended on making it publicly available at some point.

Most of the information in there was gathered by me searching for specific Land Lots in the Cherokee County deeds archive as well as the Cherokee County GIS website. It’s pretty easy to find documents if you search on the Land Section / Land Lot numbers, provided the documents are indexed. If they’re not indexed, then it’s still possible to look at documents, but you won’t be able to search for them. You literally have to just thumb through the pages in the unindexed archive looking for last names, or hopefully you have a book/page number that you can turn to and find the document you need.

The diagrams that are on that page I created were all created by me using the GIS website. In some cases, I literally read the deed information that describes the plot of land, and then attempted to follow the described property lines with the measurement tool to create an outline of approximately what the land is.

Click here if you want to go right to the timeline page!

Land Research

Chris

Geography is the history of the world; it’s the story of what we humans have done to the world.”

– Desmond Tutu

One night during the summer of 2020 I was sitting on my deck off the back of my house listening to the birds and having a drink. I was looking out at the 1/3 acre backyard which just had a few trees cut down. I had previously watched all the tree maintenance guys bring in equipment to cut the trees, grind up the stumps, and tear out all the old shrubs and other unwanted landscaping.

Before the new grass was laid down, the Earth was briefly exposed to the sky for a few weeks. As I sat there and looked at the dirt section of my back yard, I had this odd thought cross my mind. This is pretty typical for me, and probably why I have so many diverse hobbies and interests. I had wondered if somewhere in the dirt there was items from the previous owner of my house. Maybe toys from their kids, or lost tools or maybe even construction materials like nails or screws tthat had gotten burried.

I could probably have bought myself a metal detector and answered some of my own questions. But my thoughts quickly shifted to something far broader…

What was on this land before my house was?

Kind of a strange thought because I already knew that my neighborhood was built on previously unused land, or at least that’s what I was told. So, what does that mean? It was wooded and not developed? Or was it just a large field that someone owned? Was it a farm that just went abandoned and not worked anymore?

My property, like most of the other lots in my neighborhood, is quite small. I started wondering about the entire neighborhood. What was here before we all were? What did it look like when it was being built? What did it look like in 1940? Did the topography of the land have to be altered to accomodate roads / sewers / water mains? What did the creek flowing through our neighborhood look like before all of this was built?

Lots of questions that are a combination of history and geography. Time and space questions. What did this space look like at a different time. Very appropriate considering I’m into SciFi stuff like time travel.

I already had a background in researching “Then & Now” material as it relates to abandoned buildings in downtown Detroit. I would research pre-Depression architecture that was still standing, find old photos, and then embark on “urbex” adventures into the buildings to photograph them in an attempt to get a matching photo from modern times.

All of this curiousity started me on a path of researching the history of the land around my neighborhood. Just using resources available on the Internet, I was able to find out quite a lot of information including historic aerial photos going back as far as 1938. I have absolutely no background in surveying land, topology, or how to read legal documents regarding land ownership, but all of this research gave me a basic understanding of those items, and quite a lot more.

I’ve disovered and used many online tools like GIS databases giving you access to deed / plat / lien information, historic photo collections, and mapping software for satellite / street view / fly-over photography. As I answered all the questions I had about my own neighborhood I began to branch out to areas around it. My collection of information was growing.

I started to realize that there might be benefit for other people in my neighborhood that had similiar curiosities. It didn’t seem to make sense to me to keep all this information locked up on my hard drive only visible to me.

So, I decided that I’ll publish some of the work I’ve been doing on a blog so it’s avaiablle to people that have an interest in this stuff. Enjoy!

First Post

Chris

First post to a new blog!

Now comes the hard part… what do I make it all about? I guess coming up with that isn’t terribly difficult since the purpose of this site/blog is to publish interests of mine, and I have a lot of interests.

I could easily just publish on X, but I wanted a space that I almost fully control (I say “almost” because I still have a cloud service provider and domain provider that I don’t control). A blog/CMS site allows me to control the look of it, the content is absolutely not filtered, and I can build structure with menus/dropdowns/links/media wherever I want to place it. This isn’t possible on a site like X.

I have a lot of favorite topics, interests, and hobbies that I I like to focus on, so most my content will be quite random. This is where categories and tagging will come in handy! Some of the things I hope to create some posts about include:

  • Technology – Linux, AI imagery, home automation, scripting, Python, servers, cloud computing/infrastructure, gaming, home PC building, retro-computing, soldering/electronics, DIY projects, lithium-ion cell projects, solar
  • Automotive – electric cars, classic cars, cheap cars, quirky cars, automotive Youtubers
  • Land Research – historical land use, records, deeds, plats, aerial/satellite photography, topography, 3D land imagery, rural exploration/urbex
  • Music – saxophones, sheet music, music theory, electronic music/trackers, retro music/chiptunes, Spotify playlists, genres, instruments
  • Firearms – handguns, shotguns, rifles, concealed carry, shooting range, scopes, air-powered handguns
  • Art – 3D artwork, bitmap artwork/editing, traditional artwork, AI-generated art, memes

I have decided that some topics I have an interest in will not be on this site. These are things I will occasionally post about on X, but I’d like to keep this kind of content off this site to avoid divisive topics that just cause arguments, negativity, or cause me trouble with my coworkers/employer. I usually keep my place of employment hidden online, but I am actually proud of where I work and think it would be nice to occasionally post about the great work we’re doing there.

I probably won’t be enabling comments on this site either. This is mostly to avoid having to deal with bots/spam, and also because I really don’t have any interest in this site becoming a two-way discussion forum where I need to moderate content from people. I will be avoiding topics like: religion, politics, social identity, political correct/incorrectness, flat-earth theory, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and whether or not pineapple should be on pizza.

That seems like enough “hello world” material. Alright then… off we go!