Athens

Athens exists because of a university, not the other way around. In 1801, trustee John Milledge bought 633 acres on the Oconee River specifically to build a new state school on it, and named the settlement after the Athens of Plato and Aristotle’s Academy. For a few decades in the 1830s and ’40s the town ran on cotton mills instead of classrooms, earning the nickname “the Manchester of the South,” before it settled into the identity it has now: the Classic City, built around the campus that started it. In 1991, Athens and Clarke County merged into a single unified government, only the second one in Georgia and the 28th in the country at the time.

The University of Georgia was chartered on January 27, 1785, and calls itself the first state-chartered public university in the United States — a claim built on the fact that no other state had passed a charter for one yet. The campus is also an accredited arboretum, with roughly 9,000 trees across more than 150 species growing right through the middle of class buildings and dorms. The whole place runs on Bulldog red on football Saturdays, but the rest of the week it’s a normal Southern college town of coffee shops, bookstores and porches.

The part that surprises people who only know Athens as a college town: a small, isolated, art-school-adjacent music scene here produced R.E.M. and the B-52’s within four years of each other. The B-52’s formed in 1976 after a few friends split a drink at a Chinese restaurant and ended up jamming together that night, and R.E.M. played its first show in 1980 in a deconsecrated church that two of its members were using as an apartment. Neither band left Athens because Athens was where the scene was; the scene grew because there was nowhere else in town to go.

Start at The Arch, the iron gateway at the north end of UGA’s North Campus on Broad Street at College Avenue, which UGA Student Affairs places within the iron fence erected along the campus’s northern edge in 1857, still standing at the edge of downtown. Campus legend credits a freshman’s vow: the student newspaper The Red & Black, quoting a university archivist, reports that Daniel H. Redfearn vowed in 1905 never to pass through the Arch until he had his diploma, his English professor passed the plan along to his other students, and the most well-known myth since is that walking under the Arch before graduation keeps a student from graduating on time or at all. Two blocks south is the payoff for anyone who likes an odd legal footnote: the Tree That Owns Itself, a white oak that a UGA professor supposedly deeded to itself sometime in the 1820s, “entire possession of itself and of all land within eight feet of it on all sides.” The original tree blew down in 1942; the one on the corner now grew from one of its acorns and was planted in 1946.

Last Resort Grill occupies the name and the building of a 1966 folk and country club that once hosted Jimmy Buffett and Steve Martin before the doors closed for a decade. It reopened as a restaurant in 1992 and has run ever since on Southwestern-inspired Southern food, with dinner nightly and weekend brunch.

Five & Ten, in a historic house on Milledge Avenue, opened in 2000 as chef Hugh Acheson’s first restaurant and helped win him a James Beard Award for Best Chef Southeast in 2012; Acheson sold it to his longtime business partner in 2024, and it’s still open under the same roof with the same farm-to-table approach.

4 breweries within 10 miles of Athens, one of them a brewpub with a kitchen.

Brewpub locations from Open Brewery DB (MIT)

No NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL or MLS team plays in Athens — the pro teams are all an hour-plus away in Atlanta. Here, Saturdays in the fall belong entirely to the Bulldogs.

5 more Highway Heads places lie within about 180 miles of Athens in a straight line — far enough that most are a night away rather than an afternoon.

• AugustaGeorgiaabout 85 mi
• AshevilleNorth Carolinaabout 120 mi
• Great Smoky MountainsTennesseeabout 120 mi
• ColumbiaSouth Carolinaabout 130 mi
• CharlotteNorth Carolinaabout 170 mi

• Babyland General HospitalQuirky museumClevelandabout 51 miles away

  Cost to see it

  Free

  When you can see it

  Only while it is open, and we did not find its hours published

  Nearest road

  US-129

  Cabbage Patch dolls 'born' in a hospital-themed mansion

  Read on the page we checked

These are things you can go and look at, not a recommendation of any of them. Oddities move, get sold and quietly disappear more than anything else we list, so check anything you are driving a long way for. Where this list says we did not find a price or opening times published, that is exactly what we mean. A blank is not “free” and not “always open”. Some sit on private land and can only be seen from the road — please do not go onto anyone’s property. Every entry links the page we read it off.

Budget a full day for the Arch, downtown and a museum or the botanical garden; add a second day if you want a day trip to Watson Mill Bridge or Madison without rushing.

Football Saturdays change everything. Sanford Stadium seats 93,033 in a city of 127,315 people (2020 census), and the downtown parking decks sell single-gameday parking at $50^*, first-come, first-served, according to the Athens Downtown Development Authority; Visit Athens GA says booking a hotel early is recommended, especially during peak event seasons like UGA football. Check the UGA schedule before you book if a game is not part of the plan.

Downtown is walkable once you park: the Athens Downtown Development Authority calls downtown Athens pedestrian-friendly, and the Arch stands on Broad Street at College Avenue.

The music scene is a nightly thing, not a museum piece. The 40 Watt Club and Georgia Theatre both still book touring and local acts most weeks, so check the calendar rather than assuming a night off.

*Fees subject to change, please check downtownathensga.org for updated information.

The Arch & North Campus

Address

College Ave & Broad St, Athens, GA 30602

Hours

Outdoors, always open to walk through

Price

Free

Link

visit.uga.edu

We checked fees, operating status and reservations on 2026-09-21. These change without notice — confirm with 40watt.com, downtownathensga.org, georgiadogs.com, wuxtryrecords.com and visitathensga.com the week you travel.

Straight-line distance from Athens, not drive time.

• Athens Ben Epps (AHN) — 3 miles
• Anderson Regional (AND) — 53 miles
• DeKalb Peachtree (PDK) — 53 miles