COMMUNITY Welcome • • • TO FACTBOOK • • •
By Shannon Ballew
sballew@mdjonline.com
Cobb County is home to a diverse and growing
community, and is a destination for good schools,
entertainment and job opportunities.
Over 760,000 people live in the county, which is
an important economic engine in the metropolitan
Atlanta area.
The county includes six cities: Acworth, Austell,
Kennesaw, Powder Springs, Smyrna and Marietta, which
is the county seat. Roswell, now part of Fulton County,
was a Cobb city until 1932. Cobb also includes several
unincorporated communities, such as Mableton, which
used to be a city, Vinings, Cumberland and east Cobb.
The area’s original residents were Native Americans, who
built permanent settlements around the Chattahoochee
River, which provided game, fish and shellfish to live on.
Cobb County was formally established by the state of
Georgia in 1832, and it takes its name from Thomas W. Cobb,
a U.S. senator, state legislator and superior court judge.
Cobb’s history includes two notable Civil War events.
In the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862, Union raiders
commandeered a train in what is now Kennesaw, and
Confederates chased it for 87 miles. Two years after that,
one of the bloodiest battles in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign
took place on Cobb County soil, the Battle of Kennesaw
Mountain.
The county saw an economic jump-start when Bell
Aircraft announced it was opening a factory in 1942.
By 1945, over 28,000 workers were employed at the Bell
Bomber plant pitching in for the war effort. In 1951, the
plant became the home of Lockheed Corporation, which
remains a major force in Cobb’s economy.
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The military also remains a important presence in the
form of Dobbins Air Reserve Base. Constructed in 1941
as Rickenbacker Field, it is now the largest multi-service
reserve training base in the world with more than 10,000
guardsmen and reservists from the Air Force, Army, Navy
and Marines.
Today, Cobb County has become a thoroughly modern
part of metropolitan Atlanta, the home of Home Depot,
Lockheed and the Atlanta Braves. People here are on
average wealthier and better educated than in the rest of
the state or country. Cobb’s two public school districts
are Cobb County School District, which educates about
113,000 students, and Marietta City Schools, a smaller
district within Marietta city limits with about 8,900
students.
The county is also home to one of the state’s largest
universities, Kennesaw State University, as well as a
multitude of private and charter schools.
Cobb is also home to some of Atlanta’s favorite sports
teams, with Atlanta United FC’s headquarters in Marietta
and the Braves’ Truist Park in Cumberland.
The county is governed by a five-member Board of
Commissioners, consisting of a chairman and four district
commissioners, while the cities are each governed by a
mayor-city council system.
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Welcome to Cobb county!
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