īy 1845, John Edgar Thomson, chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, suggested that Marthasville's name be changed. Terminus received a name change in 1842 when the town's 30 inhabitants voted to change the town's name to Marthasville, in honor of Governor Lumpkin's daughter. As a result, the town named Terminus was founded in 1837, named for the end of the railroad line. By 1836, the state-financed Western and Atlantic Railroad, linking the middle of Georgia to the other states north and west, was granted a charter by the legislature, which was signed into law by Lumpkin. In 1833, Lumpkin, who had become governor, requested that the state legislature charter three railroad lines. The history of downtown began in 1826 with Wilson Lumpkin and Hamilton Fulton surveying a possible canal route between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Milledgeville, Georgia's capital at the time. This area only includes the core central business district neighborhoods of Fairlie-Poplar, Five Points, the Hotel District, Centennial Hill, and South Downtown. This area is roughly bound by North Avenue to the north, Piedmont Avenue and the Downtown Connector to the east, Martin Luther King Jr Drive, Courtland Street, and Edgewood Avenue to the south, and the railroad tracks to the west. The Atlanta Downtown Improvement District (ADID) organization, though, defines a much smaller downtown area measuring just one and two tenths square miles. This definition includes central areas like Five Points, the Hotel District, and Fairlie-Poplar, and outer neighborhoods such as SoNo and Castleberry Hill.
Downtown is bound by North Avenue to the north, Boulevard to the east, Interstate 20 to the south, and Northside Drive to the west.