Small Towns Removed From Georgia's New Map

"Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too. A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere 'placeholders,' generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.

Mapmaking criteria vary by state, and it is not unusual for a little housecleaning over time, often to get rid of place names now considered racially offensive. But other states said it is almost unheard of to see hundreds of communities given the boot in a single year.

Because of...complaints, Georgia transportation officials said they will take another look at their guidelines for what constitutes a 'community.'"