State of Georgia deletes Sandtown, Aonia, 500 others saying our small towns ‘just clutter up’ the state map The Georgia Department of
Transportation has messed up. On their official 2006 Georgia state road maps, they’ve gone and removed the Aonia and Sandtown from the map, along with more than 500 other perfectly good Georgia towns and communities.

Magnified to twice its actual size, the GDOT 2005 state map had tiny type, but at least Sandtown and Aonia were still there.

Not surprisingly, some folks feel a little slighted to have been evicted from the landscape of Georgia by a state agency. Sandtown resident Roger Walker, who with his wife Vivian are about 10 percent of the population of the greater Sandtown metropolitan area, is one of them.

“I’m really sorry to hear we’re off the map,” Walker said. “I’m going to have to hold on to my old maps. That’s always been my criteria on buying a map, whether it has Sandtown on it or not.”

In their “2006-2007 Official Highway and Transportation Map,” the GDOT has seen fit to eliminate not only Sandtown and Aonia from the map of Wilkes County, they’ve also eliminated nearby Georgia communities such as Amity, Dewy Rose, and Fortsonia, not to mention those great Georgia names like Ty Ty, Hopeulikit, Po Biddy Crossroads, and Poetry Tulip.

The state map makers decided Georgia’s state map had too many communities like Sandtown and Aonia, places they call “place-holders,” and it was too hard to get all the tiny names onto the map.

“The map was too cluttered. We went ahead and took out all the place-holders that were under 2,500 people as defined by the census,” the GDOT’s Karlene Barron told the Associated Press.

Many people have commented that Georgia’s official DOT maps had become unreadable in past years because the type used for most city names had become smaller and smaller. This year, the state’s clever solution to the map-printing challenge was to pretend that some 500 Georgia places simply no longer existed.

And, although the DOT’s official explanation says they only eliminated towns of less than 2,500 residents, the growing Columbia County cities of Martinez (28,000) and Evans (18,000) have disappeared off the map, too. Some “placeholders.”

One look at the DOT map of Georgia shows no “clutter” problem in Wilkes County. Aonia was the only community in the 20-mile stretch of U.S. 78 between Washington and Thomson, and there is plenty of room for the name.

A spokesman for Rand McNally, North America’s largest commercial mapmaker, told the Associated Press that a change of even a dozen place names on its state maps was rare. Joel Minster, the company’s chief cartographer, said, “We won’t take a town off the map if we can confirm there’s still a landmark, even if there’s no people there.”

Rand McNally, he said, deals with a map’s clutter by varying the size and style of its print.

But to Roger Walker and other rural Georgians, no DOT mapmaker can detract from what their community means to them. “As far as I’m concerned, Sandtown is the center of the universe,” he said, “whether the DOT sees fit to put it on their map or not.”

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