In a recent blog post, we examined recent trends in population growth utilizing the newly-released 2022 county population estimates . This entry considers a longer sweep of history, in this case going back to 1900 through the animated cartogram below.

A cartogram is a special type of map where, the size of each geographic unit represents some attribute other than its physical area, in this case total population. Naturally, this means that the shapes of the counties are distorted somewhat. In animating the below cartogram, we are also able to scale the maps in proportion to Georgia’s current population to represent population growth over time. We also color-shaded counties by current regional commission membership (see the legend).  Check out the bottom of the graphic to track “the numbers” over time –in tandem with the shape shifts shown on the map.

A few things stand out in this animation:

  • Georgia’s current population is about 5 times what it was in 1900.
  • Fulton County has been the most populous through the entire period, even before it absorbed Campbell and Milton counties during the Great Depression.
  • Recently, however, other metro Atlanta counties have emerged as rivals to the top spot. Gwinnett County, which had less than one-quarter the population of Fulton County in 1900 and fewer than 50,000 residents as recently as the early 1960s is now in the number two spot with over nine-tenths of Fulton’s population. Cobb and DeKalb round out the top four; Chatham, the number 5 county, has less than half of DeKalb’s population.
  • Thanks to the growth of these suburban counties, the territory of the current 11 Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) counties has grown from about a 12% share of the statewide population in 1900 to 46% today.

A few notes related to data and methods:

  • For the sake of simplicity and consistency, we used current counties and regional commission memberships. For example, Milton and Campbell counties are treated as part of Fulton County throughout. Similarly, counties such as Peach that did not exist in the early 1900s are treated as if they had zero population at the time. And Forsyth County is shaded as an ARC member throughout, even though it only moved to the ARC in July of 2021– and Regional Commissions obviously didn’t exist back in 1900.
  • The Census Bureau has released intercensal annual estimates since the 1970s. For decades prior to 1970, estimates come from linear interpolation.
  • Cartograms were created in QGIS via the Cartogram3 plugin using the default stop conditions.