Education Edition - 1736 Magazine, Fall 2019

COLUMBIA COUNTY
Hot in
Harlem
City’s downtown comes back
to life after years of decline
By DAMON CLINE
T
he town of Harlem, Ga., is
merely a puddle in Columbia
County’s sprawling sea of subdivisions
and shopping centers.
But instead of grousing about
what they don’t have, leaders in this
community of nearly 4,000 are laser-focused on
the one thing Harlem has that the rest of the county
doesn’t: a bonafide downtown.
“There’s nothing unique about Harlem outside
of Columbia County,” City Manager C. Brett Cook
says. “You go outside the county and there are two
or three towns like Harlem – it’s only unique in
Columbia County.”
Indeed, Harlem’s central business district is the
quintessential Southern downtown, a byproduct
of being a train stop along the Georgia Railroad and
the crossroads of U.S. Highways 221 and 78, known
to locals as Louisville Street and Milledgeville Road.
Harlem’s distance from Columbia County’s
sprawl has given its downtown a “stuck-in-time”
aesthetic that is absent in the county’s more
populous eastern end, where unincorporated communities
such as Martinez and Evans have been
shaped into suburbs of Augusta during the past few
decades.
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