Villa Rica, GA: Main Street

By Jen

I usually tell people I live in Atlanta when they ask. But honestly, I live much closer to the Alabama border than I do to Atlanta proper. In other words, I live out in the middle of nowhere. 

It's a very suburban middle of nowhere. My little town is called Villa Rica. (And pay close attention -- you pronounce that as if you have never even heard of the Spanish language. It's VIL-A RICK-A. It took me a whole month to pronounce it the local way when we first moved here.) 

My town was founded during Georgia's gold rush (apparently at one point they had heard of Spanish to name it this) and we have a little gold museum where you can pan for gold and look at artifacts from the gold-rush period. My town is fairly small and one of my absolute favorite things about it is that it has an actual main street. 

We have tiny little stores and locally-owned restaurants. In the last few years, they also built an outdoor amphitheater where they hold local events, concerts, outdoor movies, and a weekly farmer's market in the summer. 

(Photo from The Preserve at Mirror Lake)

We go to our farmer's market almost every week. It's tiny (like my little town) and only takes about three minutes to walk from end to end, but we can get all kinds of produce, honey, homemade crafts, and homemade soaps there from the fifteen or so booths. (All together now for locally grown, fresh Georgia peaches: mmmmm!) It is located just off our main street and I love the little, local town feeling I get from hanging out in our tiny downtown. My three year old usually scores a couple of handfuls of free blueberries and she's also gotten a few bags of candy handed to her from a local merchant. This is the smallest town we've ever lived in (we, uh, move A LOT) and I really love the local pride here. I'm always telling my husband that our little town is just SO CUTE!

Comments

[J]

"It's VIL-A RICK-A." That cracked me up! I know what you mean. I used to live in the general area of a place called "Bois D'Arc" which the locals insisted was "Bodark."