By Michael Green
(Second in a series)
MILTON, Ga. | Would Sallie Duncan Liddell recognize the Liddell farm in 2026? Of course not. Though the remnants of first growth timber were already scarce when she farmed; continued timbering projects had left few old growth trees. Sawmills had been erected onsite to make cash profits from the forests. The first growth trees that remained were in the ravine that bisected the original land grant.
In 1980, I saw the three-foot diameter stump of a once-giant tree. Someone trespassing had foolishly tried to fell it. New hardwoods, scrub growth, and pines reforested the fallow fields. The topography of the land would change so dramatically as to become unrecognizable.
Acres of asphalt and enormous warehouses would cover the rich soil that had produced cash crops and vegetables and fruits for home use. The fertile ground had often yielded the arrow points of the Creeks who lived on the land before the Liddells. Even this dark ground would disappear.
Men in suits had been wandering off the expressway for several years. They would follow the dirt lane that is now called West Liddell Road and end up on the cement driveway of the 1957 Liddell House. Dan and Nellie would receive their guests on the screened porch where they would listen to excited promises of profits from the sale of land.
Around 1967, Harold Liddell, youngest grandson of the matriarch, and two other men paid a call. Harold introduced Dan and Nellie to W.R. (Dudge) Pruitt, Gwinnett County Commission chairman, and another man from the county zoning department. Dan Liddell, a fellow with a dry wit and a man wary of politicians, later called the road that eventually came out of this meeting, the “Politick Road.”
We know it now as Satellite Boulevard. Politick Road was created on acreage cutting through two miles of Liddell property. In its first phase, Satellite Boulevard, originally called Davidson Industrial Boulevard, was over two miles long, starting at Beaver Ruin Road and ending at Pleasant Hill Road adjacent to the site of Gwinnett Place Mall. About 80 percent of the road easement that ran parallel to I-85 cut through Liddell property. It has become the major north-south route of commerce in Gwinnett County.
After the death of Nellie Mae Mills Liddell in 1984, the 1957 brick ranch house was sold, jacked up from its foundation, and moved to a site miles away in Lawrenceville. Gwinnett Place opened on February 1, 1984. The Realtors who had been sending interest checks for over a decade to the grandchildren of Sallie Duncan Liddell decided that one of the last large properties fronting I-85 would be sold. The Matriarch’s senior citizen grandchildren gathered at the site of the 1840 house and said their goodbyes to the home place. Only seven acres of the Lower Place remained in the hands of a Liddell grandchild. These acres would, with some interesting irony, become a Harry’s Farmers Market, the precursor to Whole Foods. As West Liddell Road terminates near I-85, that land is now home to Costco.
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