Atlanta’s Soccer Origins: The Lithonia Soccer Club

While FIFA and the 2026 World Cup are in Georgia, let’s dive into the history of Atlanta soccer, which began right here in the Heritage Area in Lithonia with Scottish immigrants. 

How big of a soccer fan are you, Georgia? It might surprise some to learn that Atlanta’s soccer’s origins begin outside the metro area in historic Lithonia, the “City of Granite.” This summer marks the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with matches taking place across North America, including (for the first time) here in Georgia’s capital! But how and when did soccer first take hold in Georgia? Like many stories in the Heritage Area, it actually begins with granite.

A Scottish Pastime

For many, soccer’s origins in Atlanta began in 1967 with the arrival of the Chiefs of the old North American Soccer League (NASL). Yet the sport’s history in the metropolitan area goes back much earlier, to the late nineteenth century, and was closely tied to the growing granite industry in eastern DeKalb County that was centered around the quarries at Stone Mountain and Arabia Mountain near Lithonia. Skilled stonecutters from the large Rubislaw and Kemnay quarries near Aberdeen, Scotland first began arriving in the area in the early 1880s for seasonal work cutting architectural stone and “Belgian Block” to fulfill the increasing number of construction and street paving contracts in Atlanta and other major cities in Georgia and the Southeast.

Seventeen Scottish stonecutters were first recorded as cutting paving block at Stone Mountain in 1883. By 1888, Samuel Hoyt Venable of Venable Brothers’ Contractors estimated that almost all of the 400 stonecutters working at his company’s industrial quarries in Stone Mountain and Lithonia were from Scotland. According to one Atlanta newspaper writer, the “colony of Scotch people” residing in Lithonia in the 1890s was “so numerous as to make one feel in strolling there that they were along the ‘banks and braes of bonny Doon.’”

The Scottish immigrants quickly developed a local reputation for militant trade unionism, blatant disregard for local liquor laws, and a fondness for sports and association football, later nicknamed “soccer,” in particular. While soccer is often referred to as an “English Game,” the Scots were the sport’s greatest global proselytizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spreading the game to Continental Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and throughout the United States, including DeKalb County.

The earliest documented reference to soccer in the DeKalb County Granite District appeared in the February 27, 1892, edition of the Atlanta Constitution. A group of Atlanta Irishmen involved with the St. Patrick’s Day organizing committee issued a challenge in the newspaper to the Scottish stonecutters at Lithonia and Stone Mountain for a friendly game of football at Piedmont Park as part of the holiday festivities. The “brawny-armed” Scots were known for having “several fine players.” Firley Baum (1870-1943), an English-born stonecutter-turned Presbyterian minister, and a longtime soccer referee in the metro area, replied for the Lithonia contingent a few days later. Baum confirmed the Scots were willing to take part in the St. Patrick’s Day game, “provided the Atlanta boys play ‘association rules’ as we play according to those rules, and no other.” While the Irish wanted to allow both kicking and catching of the ball (similar to modern-day Irish or Australian football codes), the two groups made it clear they had absolutely no desire to play American gridiron football. Remarked one Atlanta Irishman, “the college game don’t compare with it [old football rules]. There’s no science in the newfangled game, and not much fun.”

While the St. Patrick’s Day match never materialized (it was reportedly cancelled due to a full schedule of activities), the Scottish were known throughout Atlanta and DeKalb County as being “quite fond of the game.” Later attempts were made among members of the Atlanta Hibernian Society and the Lithonia Caledonian Club to organize other St. Patrick’s Day games at Piedmont Park in the following years (so far, no information has been found that sheds light on the outcomes of these planned contests).

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Scots in Lithonia were joined by a large contingent of Welsh granite workers from the quarrying town of Penmaenmawr in Northern Wales. Under the leadership of Aberdeen native Alexander Sey (1863-1931), these British-born paving cutters in DeKalb County played a key role in the reorganization of the Paving Cutters’ Union of the United States of America and Canada in Lithonia in 1901. This was a few years after the original North American trade union dissolved in the wake of the bitter lockout and national granite worker strike of 1892. To honor the efforts of Sey and other local leaders, the paving cutters’ members designated Lithonia as Branch Number 1 of the reformed union.

Stonecutters Soccer Club

Sey was also instrumental in assembling the Lithonia Soccer Club (popularly known as the “Stonecutters”), which was originally composed entirely of Scottish and Welsh paving block cutters. The team played to a 2-2 tie in Lithonia against a newly organized Atlanta side of recent Scottish immigrants as part of the metro area’s first organized soccer game of record on Christmas Day 1907. A newspaper reporter with the Atlanta Georgian was on hand to photograph the two teams before their rematch a few months later at the old Jackson Street Showgrounds in Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue neighborhood on March 21, 1908. This time, Lithonia won by a score of 2-1.

The Stonecutters teams included Welshmen Richard “Dick” Jones (1887–1957) and William T. “Billy” Jones (1889–1940). The two players (no relation) formed the attacking core of the early Lithonia sides and were fixtures of the local soccer scene well into the 1920s. British, Irish, and some Swedish players from granite quarrying centers in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and North Carolina, who migrated south to Lithonia for seasonal paving cutter work during the winter and early spring, often rounded out the team.

Meanwhile, home matches were played at the old Lithonia baseball park. Information provided by digitized newspaper articles, historic maps, and social media forum posts indicate the early-twentieth-century baseball grounds and soccer field once occupied a former clearing that was owned by local businessman and onetime Lithonia postmaster, Julius C. Johnson (1844-1918). Historically referred to as “Johnson’s Pasture,” the now reforested 21.4-acre parcel is located just southwest of downtown Lithonia and is generally bounded by Covington Highway to the south, Council Street to the east, Johnson Street to the north, and the paved Arabia Mountain PATH to the west (which follows the original alignment of the historic Lithonia & Arabia Mountain Railroad line).

The Lithonia soccer team remained active through the 1907-08 season. Work shortages and labor unrest in the local granite industry suspended team play over the next few years. However, Lithonia players Richard and Billy Jones, along with team captain, William C. “Billy” Kelly, took part in the South’s first “inter-city football match” when a select Atlanta-Lithonia side traveled to Chattanooga and defeated the local club by a score of 4-0 at Chamberlain Field on February 22, 1912. Lithonia’s Richard Jones accounted for three of Atlanta’s four goals in the win. Richard and Billy Jones also featured in subsequent home and away games versus Auburn University (both wins) and in Atlanta’s 4-0 away loss to a select Birmingham, Alabama side at Rickwood Field on February 1, 1913.

In October 1912, the Lithonia club was reorganized on a stronger footing and quickly became one of the cornerstones of the four-team, amateur Georgia State Soccer League, which was formed in the fall of 1913. The Stonecutters would dominate the league’s first and only season, going undefeated en route to the title and winning the championship cup sponsored by the local A.G. Spalding & Bros. sporting goods store. However, the start of World War I in August 1914 caused the fledgling Georgia State Soccer League to collapse over the following winter as many of the British-born players returned to the United Kingdom or enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight in the war, which the US would not join until 1917.

Final Years

Lithonia would again field a squad after amateur league play returned to metro Atlanta in the early 1920s. The reorganized team of American, British, and Swedish players under captain Thomas Thornton took part in the first soccer game played at Georgia Tech’s Grant Field on February 4, 1921, but fell to the Atlanta club by a score of 7-2 in the rainy mud-soaked match.

Between 1926 and 1928, Lithonia also played sides representing the 22nd Infantry Regiment at Fort McPherson as well as a team of prisoners incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Among the recognizable surnames of Lithonia soccer team players from that period were Davidson, Rankin, Reagin, Webb, and Wiggins. But the Stonecutters of the 1920s never displayed the superiority of the pre-World War I teams, and Lithonia’s longtime association with the sport eventually faded with the dissolution of organized soccer in metro Atlanta after the 1928 season.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Patrick Sullivan is a Senior Historian and Preservation Planner with New South Associates in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Mr. Sullivan has been investigating the people, places, and events associated with the history of soccer in metropolitan Atlanta over the past several years. He serves as an executive board member of the Society of American Soccer History (S.A.S.H.) and authored the chapter about early organized soccer in the South for the edited collection, Soccer Frontiers: The Global Game in the United States, 1863-1913, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2021.