Electrician in Haralson County, Georgia

Buchanan, and the four towns south of it

Haralson County covers about 282 square miles, and in 1856 it was cut out of the two counties it still sits between, Polk to the north and Carroll to the south. That Carroll line runs through two towns rather than around them: Bremen is a Haralson city whose limits reach across into Carroll, and Temple is a Carroll city whose limits reach back the other way. Buchanan, Bremen, Tallapoosa and Waco are the county's own four cities. Past their city limits the county government names Budapest, Draketown and Felton, and the Census recognizes no designated place in Haralson at all, so none of those three appears on any map derived from Census records, this site's included.

Rome sits almost straight north of Buchanan, so distance in this county runs north to south and the arithmetic is easy to lay out. Measured in a straight line rather than by road, Buchanan is about thirty-two miles from the Rome base and inside the area. Going south from it, Tallapoosa and Temple are both about thirty-seven miles out, and Bremen and Waco about thirty-eight. All four sit past the line, and Tallapoosa on its own, which lies wholly inside the county, holds more than three times the residents Buchanan does. By road every one of those figures is longer again. So the edge of what we cover does not land on a county line here. It lands inside the county, north of four of its five towns.

The west side of Haralson is the Alabama state line, with Cleburne County on the far side of it, and on this county that line never becomes the one that matters. Distance gets there first. Tallapoosa is the Haralson town nearest Alabama, and it is already outside the area at about thirty-seven miles, so there is no stretch of this county where we are working up against the state boundary and weighing it. What stops the map in Haralson is the drive down from Rome, and it stops well east of Alabama.

What the Rome base means for Haralson County

Everything that limits the work here is distance from Rome, and none of it is the license. Buchanan is the piece of Haralson County that a Rome base actually reaches, and the fact that this particular piece happens to hold the courthouse does not pull the rest of the county in behind it.