I wrote this article in the fall of  2012 during my freshman year at the University of North Georgia. This won the school’s Inman Quill Award for the best freshman essay.

Dallas Hill wakes up every day at 9:00 a.m., gets the newspaper off his front porch, and starts breakfast for himself and his wife Clara. Dallas, now seventy-two years old, and his wife of fifty-four years call Gwinnett County home, something the two have done since they moved to the area from Dayton, Tennessee in 1963. At that point in time, Gwinnett was known as a quiet rural region that showed a lot of promise for young couples like Dallas and Clara.

“We moved to Gwinnett because you just couldn’t make a living in Tennessee like you could here,” Dallas says once the topic of the county is brought up in conversation. “My wife really liked it because it had plenty of shopping centers around.”

Dallas and Clara weren’t the only outsiders moving into the area, as the population saw a tremendous influx of newcomers, moving the population from 43,541 in 1960 to 72,349 just ten years later (“Population Growth”). This increasing rate of population growth only snowballed as the years went by, which resulted in the population nearly doubling every decade for the last forty years. Today Gwinnett County sits at 805,321 inhabitants, creating both a dream situation for some of the younger generations that live in the county and dream of seeing it rival the city of Atlanta and a nightmare for the elder generation like Dallas and Clara that can only sit back and remember what the county used to be like before urban America took hold.

The transformation of Gwinnett County from just another county to one of the most important areas in the entire state of Georgia seems a strange one from the outside looking in as far as timing is concerned. After all, the county had been in existence since 1818, created as a tribute to Button Gwinnett (“A Brief History of Gwinnett County”), and had served no special purpose or role to the people that lived within its borders besides being a reliable and safe location to raise a family. However, things really started to pick up for the area in the 1970s thanks to the opportunities provided by the county’s proximity to Atlanta, which lies approximately thirty-five minutes down I-85. With so many jobs available just thirty miles down the road, people began to flock to Gwinnett by the thousands, leading to the area becoming a de facto center of growth.

By the time the 1970s had reached the 1980s, Gwinnett was the proud owner of a population that had skyrocketed to 166,903 citizens, leading to a much-needed growth of industry within the county. More and more companies began keeping a keen eye on Gwinnett and its potential for business locations and company headquarters, which allowed for more citizens to enter the area and work even closer to home. The result of all of these factors is the Gwinnett County that people have come to know and accept: an area marked with urbanization as well as more people than four U.S. states.

To see a clear representation of how drastic a change the population growth has caused to Gwinnett County, look no further than its ever expanding school system. In 1982 the area was home to ten high schools: Berkmar, Buford, Central Gwinnett, Dacula, Duluth, Greater Atlanta Christian, North Gwinnett, Norcross, South Gwinnett, and Parkview. Fast-forward thirty years, and Gwinnett is now up to twenty-two high schools in order to meet the demand of the huge population. The most alarming piece of this puzzle is the fact that this expansion doesn’t appear to be close to finished, as extreme overcrowding in some of the schools in the Peachtree Ridge cluster has led to the need for another high school, which will not be built until 2015 (Downey paragraph 5). In the meantime, schools in this cluster as well as several others in the county must make the most out of what they have on hand, whether it may mean utilizing classes in trailers, sharing common rooms, or developing classrooms that could be completely portable.

While the addition of this new high school may solve the issue in the meantime, the population’s non-stop growth points to even more needed additions that will have to occur sooner rather than later, which will undoubtedly lead to the raising of taxes in what appears more and more like a non-stop cycle of taxpayers giving more than they can usually handle and the school system taking and putting out a product—in this case, a school—that becomes unsatisfactory and inefficient in a surprisingly short span of time. Although fingers can be pointed to several different sources, it is obvious that the impetus of the issues is the population that long ago became out of control and is still hard to gauge.

Although Gwinnett County has a lot to offer those interested in the area, including many entertainment opportunities at venues like Gwinnett Arena on Sugarloaf Parkway or Coolray Field off of Highway 20, the constant growth has led to a glaring complication that must be addressed: crime. A county that may have once been significantly shaken by a stickup had an average of close to 29 murders, 126 rapes, and 648 aggravated assaults per year from 2000 up to 2010 (Woodson), signaling that something is horribly wrong with what the area has become. Drugs have also taken a terrible impact on the area, becoming so out of control that a story from the USA Today in 2009 called Gwinnett “the epicenter of [Atlanta’s] drug activity” (Copeland & Johnson).

The expanding Hispanic population of Gwinnett, which increased by an astounding 152% from 2010 to 2011 (Schneider & Stafford), has been largely blamed for these smuggling nuisances. Police have found that a portion of the Hispanics living in Gwinnett County is in fact part of Mexican drug cartels, which look to camouflage themselves in the area in order to gain access to sources of distributing their drug of choice, whether it be cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, or heroin. Although the law enforcement in the county now have had more time to gather a pulse on how to spot those responsible for the drug trafficking and have made strides in preventing drugs from entering the county and catching those violators that attempt to do so, these problems are still too prevalent for Gwinnett to be considered completely safe.

Dallas Hill ended the conversation on Gwinnett by discussing the amount of people in the area, lamenting “Traffic is terrible here now. You [practically] have to have a red light to get out of the driveway.” While Dallas and Clara may not be around to see it happen, it appears more and more likely that the renovations and influx of new people that has already occurred will merely be a drop in the bucket compared to what is to come. A report by Georgia’s Office of Planning and Budgeting point towards Gwinnett’s growth to continue through the next two decades, resulting in the amount of people living in the county to reach the all-time high of 1,208,392, leaving the county within 100,000 of topping Fulton County as the most populated county in the Peach State. This outcome would for all intents and purposes lead to an eventual slingshot of the area to the top of Georgia’s most influential locations past Atlanta, which could in fact lead to the county making another metamorphosis, one that may put the prior adjustments to shame.

It is a misunderstanding to judge Gwinnett for some of the transgressions that have occurred over the years and have caused some to create a permanent negative label on it; it is in fact a county full of promise and opportunities for people regardless of their personal backgrounds. However, these prickly problems that currently plague the county do not appear to be drawing close to a conclusion and undoubtedly will not since the population is continuing to rise, which may lead to countless complaints and a handful of headaches from the people that are not newcomers to the area. The Gwinnett County that Dallas Hill experienced in 1963 compared to the one he encounters on a daily basis today share very few similarities other than having the same name on the green welcome signs located on the outskirts of the county; will the same be said for the Gwinnett that his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will experience in their lifetimes?