By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 25, 2025 | Nearly every week in Gwinnett, there’re official groundbreakings of new businesses.
New firms frequent this county of one million people, as entrepreneurs develop new opportunities to serve this vast county. It may be a new doctor’s office, a new restaurant, or a CPA starting out on his own. Sometimes it’s a major new employer.
Just think of the many firms that have opened their doors in Gwinnett in the last 50 years. In 2022, Gwinnett County, Georgia had 22,440 employer firms. This number includes 13,691 men-owned and 5,386 women-owned businesses. And new ones open so frequently!
It’s also instructive at how groundbreakings have changed.
Can you believe this: Back in the 1970s, when at the Gwinnett Daily News, I would arrive at a groundbreaking….to find that the organizers weren’t entirely versed on what was to happen. They were opening a new business, and wanted to “break ground.” Mainly, they wanted press coverage for their new venture.
In reality, they often didn’t know the procedure. It didn’t happen only once, but often. It got to the point that I started hauling a shovel in the trunk of my ’74 Pontiac. For I would get to the groundbreaking, yet the participants sometimes did not think to provide a shovel for this ceremony. What were they thinking? So, I would open my trunk, and pull out my shovel to be in many a photo in the newspaper in the “early days” of Gwinnett groundbreakings.
Back then, the owner of the business would actually man the shovel and dig into the tough Gwinnett dirt. The owner often had to stomp on the shovel to overturn the dirt. If the new business owner was a woman, often a man would do the shoveling and then the woman would pose with the upturned dirt.
A few years later, a change had taken place. By then, shovels would be thought of, and sometimes there would be several. Often these were new shovels, sometimes each sprayed with gold paint, and not just your ordinary grimy home shovel.
Then later on, when arriving at groundbreakings we would find that someone had dumped a small batch of sandy soil for the shovels to dig easily into. No more hard stomping on the shovel, but an easy penetration of the dirt by the clean new shovel. Man, we were getting uptown! My old shovel in the trunk was seeing no activity.
Today, groundbreakings sometimes find bulldozers or back hoes there to overturn the dirt. And since press photographers have themselves routinely done groundbreakings, they often help to line up the participants and guide them. After all, today’s photogs have become experts in this.
Wonder who added a new element to groundbreakings? Instead of the staid photo of people pushing on the shovels before groundbreaking, it got to be a fad to have the participants on the count of three, to toss a shovelful of dirt in the air toward the cameraman, so the photographer can get this “action shot.” So much for action shots.
Today the new business may have already completed their building, and instead of groundbreakings, it is a grand opening. And in Gwinnett you usually see at least one, if not more, such openings each week.
My once-useful shovel is quietly at home in my shed, no longer at work in photos. And no, there’s no giant pair of scissors in my auto today for ribbon-cuttings!
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