American Reunion|Olde Town Conyers Depot — East Great Falls Had a Railroad

The depot at 901 Railroad Street in Conyers has stood since 1891, built just east of where the first one stood before Kenner Garrard's Federal cavalry burned it on 22 July 1864. When Sherman's column came through that November, the wreck of a Confederate locomotive taken in that raid was still sitting in the station yard. Union troops tore up the Georgia Railroad along this stretch, burned the ties and wrapped the red-hot rails around tree trunks.

None of that is in American Reunion. The film used Olde Town Conyers in the summer of 2011 for the small-town street backdrop a Michigan comedy needs and that Georgia sells at a discount. The depot anchors the district: brick and timber, a deep overhanging roof, the tracks still live a few feet from the platform, and two blocks of nineteenth-century storefronts running off it.

Freight still comes through. Stand on the platform long enough and a train will pass close enough to move the air and rattle the boards under your feet, which is a sensation no set dressing has ever reproduced.

The pilgrimage here is not really to a scene. It is to the reason location scouts keep circling back to this street: one intact block where the twentieth century never quite got around to knocking anything down.