Dunwoody

The area was established in the early 1830s and is named for Major Charles Dunwody, born 1828 and died 1905. The extra o came from a banking note on which the name was spelled wrong. He went back to Roswell after fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War.

One of the oldest buildings dates from 1829. Ebenezer Primitive Baptist Church, at Roberts Drive and Spalding Drive, is still active and has one of the city's oldest cemeteries, where many founders are buried. The first public school, Dunwoody Elementary, stood near the center of town at Chamblee-Dunwoody Road and Mount Vernon Road and ran from 1911 to 1986. The Dunwoody branch of the DeKalb County library and the North DeKalb Cultural Arts Center now sit on the corner where its cafeteria burned in 1966.

In 1881 the Roswell Railroad opened and ran along what is now Chamblee-Dunwoody Road north to the Chattahoochee River. It operated for 40 years. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt made a campaign whistle stop in Dunwoody on the way to Roswell. The railroad turned the place into a small crossroads community, and it kept growing after the line shut down in 1921.

Dunwoody stayed rural until suburban housing began in the 1960s. In 1971 the Spruill family sold a large piece of land for Perimeter Mall, and Dunwoody Village was finished the same year.

Cityhood came after Sandy Springs showed the way in 2005. A feasibility study by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government of the University of Georgia was done in early 2006. Critics said incorporation would drain tax money from the rest of the county, as they claimed had happened in Fulton. Citizens for Dunwoody, a nonprofit begun by Senator Dan Weber, pushed the effort. The bill was pulled for more study in 2006 and passed only the lower house in 2007. Weber brought it back in 2008 and it passed both chambers. Governor Sonny Perdue signed it on March 25, and voters approved cityhood overwhelmingly in a referendum on July 15. On December 1, 2008, after a three-year movement, Dunwoody officially became a city.

The first mayor was Ken Wright. Lynn Deutsch was elected mayor in November 2019. City hall moved to 4800 Ashford-Dunwoody Road in early 2018, after the city bought the property in 2017. Dunwoody has its own police force of 64 officers, but gets schools, fire and rescue, sanitation, water and sewage from DeKalb County.

Dunwoody Village is the historic heart, and the Dunwoody Farmhouse is there. Its Colonial Williamsburg style began with the Dunwoody Village Shopping Center in the 1970s, and later building copied it, which gave the city a distinct look.

Perimeter Center is the edge city around Perimeter Mall, which was developed in 1971 and set off waves of office, housing and retail building. It is one of metro Atlanta's biggest job centers. The mall and about 40 percent of the Perimeter Community Improvement District are in Dunwoody, and the western part crosses into Sandy Springs. The tallest building in Dunwoody is the 34-story Ravinia 3, at 444 feet. The area sits where GA 400 meets I-285, and the Dunwoody Transit Station serves it.

Georgetown, developed in the early 1960s, is near I-285 and borders Chamblee. Too much building there, with new apartments approved even in some single-family areas, was one of the main reasons the incorporation movement started. It is one of the most walkable parts of the city. The Williamsburg commercial district on the eastern edge has shopping centers around the intersection of Mt. Vernon, Dunwoody Club Drive and Jett Ferry Road.

Winters Chapel, at the border with Peachtree Corners, is named for Winters Chapel Methodist Church, which has been at its present location since the 1870s. Tilly Mill is named for the pioneer Tilly family, who owned a farm and mill there. It holds the Dunwoody campus of Georgia State University's Perimeter College, the Marcus Jewish Community Center and Brook Run, the city's signature park.

Brook Run sits on 103 acres on North Peachtree Road. It has wooded trails, a children's play area, a dog park, a Veterans Memorial and a community garden, and a skate park. Windwood Hollow Park, at Lakeside Drive and Peeler Road, has tennis, a play area, a picnic pavilion and a short trail. A groomed three-quarter-mile linear park runs along the Twin Lakes reservoir on Peeler Road. The Donaldson-Bannister Farm is also a city park.

The Dunwoody Nature Center is at 5343 Roberts Drive and hosts the Dunwoody Butterfly Festival. Stage Door Players is a theater on Chamblee Dunwoody Road. Perimeter Mall is at 4400 Ashford Dunwoody Road, and Dunwoody Village is a good place for breakfast before heading downtown.

A tornado hit on the night of April 8, 1998, running east-northeast from Perimeter Center into Gwinnett County. Thousands of homes were damaged, hundreds seriously, and tens of thousands of native trees came down. It is still called the Dunwoody tornado.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution moved its headquarters from downtown Atlanta to leased offices in Perimeter Center in 2010 for financial reasons. InterContinental Hotels Group has its American corporate offices in Dunwoody, and the restaurant chain Krystal has its headquarters in the city.

Local news comes from the Dunwoody Crier, the Dunwoody Reporter, the Aha Connection and a podcast called What's Up Dunwoody.

Perimeter Center is one of the largest edge cities in the United States, and Dunwoody holds a good share of it. It is built around Perimeter Mall and spreads across three cities, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs and Brookhaven. It has over 29 million square feet of office space, 6 million square feet of retail space and 40,000 residents. Until the late 1960s it was farmland. In 1970 the developer Taylor & Mathis and its financial partner MetLife began planning a master-planned office park on an original assemblage of 510 acres.

About 100 acres went to The Rouse Company in 1971 for a mall of 1.3 million square feet. The mall took its name from Interstate 285, the 64-mile loop around Atlanta, which at the time marked the edge of the suburbs. Office parks followed beside it, among them the Ravinia and Concourse complexes in the 1980s. Georgia 400 was extended south to Buckhead in 1993, and MARTA opened the Dunwoody and Medical Center stations in 1996, with the Sandy Springs and North Springs stations arriving in 2000.

Perimeter also sits on a county line. DeKalb County is to the east and Fulton County to the west, and the line runs north and south just a few hundred yards west of the mall. Each county set up its own self-taxing community improvement district, and the two work together as one. The core of the area has its own ZIP code, 30346, which covers the southwest corner of Dunwoody. Perimeter was a rallying point for cityhood in the area, since Sandy Springs incorporated in 2005, Dunwoody in 2008 and Brookhaven in 2012.

Perimeter Mall is the second-largest mall in Georgia, behind the Mall of Georgia in Buford. It opened in 1971 on a former cow pasture. Before that the Spruill family sold a large part of its property for it, and Dunwoody Village was finished the same year. It was the seventh regional mall in metro Atlanta and the first one built outside I-285. The first anchors were two department stores, and the layout was a close copy of nearby Greenbriar Mall.

The mall has been reworked many times. A new wing in 1982 gave it a T shape. A five-level parking garage went up in November 1997. On February 20, 1998, Nordstrom opened its first store in the Southeast here, three levels and 230,000 square feet, and the mall expanded again the same year. A new Dillard's replaced a closed department store in 2005. From 2015 to 2017 the mall renovated with new flooring, lighting, seating and signs, replacing some of the original decor from the early days.

The Dunwoody station is on MARTA's Red Line, at the southwest corner of the Perimeter Mall parking lot. It opened in 1996 and was the end of the old North Line until 2000. It serves the mall, the office towers of Perimeter Center and commuters from north DeKalb and Fulton counties.

The Red Line otherwise runs in Fulton County, but it swings east to reach this station, which makes it the only Red Line station in DeKalb County. Two parking decks hold 1,048 daily and long-term spaces. Bus routes 5, 87 and 150 stop at the station, linking it to Piedmont Road, Roswell Road and Dunwoody Village.

Perimeter College began as DeKalb College, founded by the DeKalb County Board of Education in 1958. Its first classes met in Clarkston in 1964. It was renamed Georgia Perimeter College in 1997 and merged with Georgia State University on January 6, 2016. The campuses became part of Georgia State but keep their own mission, degrees and admission rules.

The Dunwoody Campus was once called the North Campus. It has an observatory that is open for public use. The college's botanical gardens include a Native Plant Garden and the Ferns of the World Garden, which has more species of ferns than any other garden in the United States. The gardens hold talks, garden walks and special sales that are open to the public.

Interstate 285, called the Perimeter, runs along the southern border, and a limited access stretch of Georgia 141 follows the southeastern border. Georgia 400 is in neighboring Sandy Springs, very close to the western edge. The Dunwoody station is the only MARTA rail station inside the city, though the Medical Center, Sandy Springs and North Springs stations are close by, and the Red Line serves all of them. Bus routes include 103 on Peeler Road and North Shallowford Road, 132 on Tilly Mill Road and 150 through Perimeter Center and Dunwoody Village. Trail plans include the Dunwoody Trailway, with PATH400 under construction.

The DeKalb County School System runs the public schools. Elementary schools include Austin, Chesnut Charter, Kingsley, Vanderlyn and Dunwoody, and the middle and high schools are Peachtree Charter Middle School and Dunwoody High School. Dunwoody Christian School is private. College options are the Georgia State University Dunwoody campus, formerly Georgia Perimeter College and before that DeKalb Community College North Campus, American InterContinental University just over the line in Sandy Springs, and a Troy University site in Atlanta.