A column of Opinion -- More than two decades ago, I wrote an opinion column I called, “The dreamers versus the dream.” This was back yonder when there was only one newspaper published in the county.

The essence was this: The dreamers left some place and came to Fayette County — mostly Peachtree City — seeking a dream. Even then, the newly arrived dreamers bumped up against this reality: Every new dreamer was a net subtraction from the dream.

Escaping overdevelopment, the new dreamers brought new development. Escaping traffic, the new dreamers brought more traffic. Getting away from the aggravations of their previous homes, the new arrivals created virtually the same aggravations for the dreamers who got here just before them.

And so it went, for another two decades.

In a downpour, I pulled a U-Haul trailer into Peachtree City during the first week of January 1977. Accompanying me was the longest sustained period of below-freezing weather that I have experienced before or since in the South. For the next month, temperatures never rose above 32 degrees. Lake Peachtree froze over and stayed that way for three weeks. Kids were warned against ice skating, but with a police department of about a half-dozen, nobody worried much about it.

When I arrived there was one high school in the county, and it was in Fayetteville. My kids went to Peachtree City Elementary School, the only one in town. They played along what we called a bike trail from Abbey Road to the two-lane, sparsely-traveled Ga. Highway 74. Farmer Huddleston raised hogs on one side of the trail near the railroad tracks and planted corn on the other side.

I once heard a cow in distress in the nearby pasture and called the police department. Two officers — of the three on duty — climbed the barbed wire fence and with remarkable good nature removed a truck tire from around the neck and horns of the aggrieved cow.

For a half-mile, the trail wound through towering hardwoods like tulip poplars and sweet gums. My kids biked through clouds of yellow butterflies in the fall and flew kites across the sedge fields.

If there were a better place on the planet to rear children, I had not heard of it.

I still own a house on Abbey Road, though I have not lived in it for several years. I saw the forests give way to tree-gulping power-line right of way. I saw developers turn my kids’ wonderland into a series of ill-considered subdivisions, on a dead-end two-lane with curbing in the wrong place and without adequate buffering.

If the land can be raped, this land was violated.

But it wasn’t my land. I had not paid a penny for it, though I enjoyed it for many years. It was zoned for commercial use for years before I ever arrived. I knew that, and I came anyway, and enjoyed what I did not own for a long time.

And then my dream bumped up against reality.

In 1982, I wrote a headline that revealed that Peachtree City’s then-current land use plan called for an astonishing 8,000-plus apartment units. Such a thing had never been mentioned in any headline before. It caused an uproar — both from the general public (of which there were fewer than 8,000 members) and from the 3-year-old development company, then known as Peachtree City Development Corp.

I remember “bush-league reporting” as one of the milder epithets the developer used in complaints to my publisher.

The land use plan — often spoken of ignorantly by multiple interests — changed several times thereafter, until by the mid-1990s, the very word “apartment” was not a respectable term used in public meetings.

As an aside — yes, once upon a very long time ago, Peachtree City’s master plan (a holdover from the wildly optimistic 1960s) called for a population of 80,000-plus. That was before the original developers (and creators of the “master plan”) went bankrupt and new landowners and developers arrived to change the very basis of the dream to meet economic realities.

The master plan was continuously whittled down in population and density as more and more dreamers arrived, registered to vote and demanded that the gates to the city be — if not locked — then severely narrowed. And so it happened.

The original “master plan” is irrelevant. But the original dream is not.

The dream is the source of the current uproar over the extension of TDK Boulevard (a road project I lukewarmly supported while Steve Brown was still mayor) and the breathtaking scope of development across Line Creek in the Wild West that is Coweta County.

Now we Peachtree City dreamers begin to receive what we were used to only giving — massive new development, greatly increased population demands and traffic out the Yazoo.

Senoia, once a truly sleepy hamlet, now has visions of grandeur, at least in population terms. Sharpsburg discovers it actually has a legally functioning governing body, one that laps up the idea of annexation and increased tax revenues.

Coweta County government — flush with Wild West growth and robber baron regulations — thumbs its nose at the snobby Peachtree City crowd, explicitly saying, “It’s our turn to grab the green now.”

And then we have the hapless Peachtree City Council and the Peachtree City Planning Commission whose collective brain has a “vacancy” sign blinking in neon lights.

Dreamers, we have all bunched up in a pile in Peachtree City, and the pile doesn’t resemble the dream.

We can’t do a thing about the outlaws in the Wild West. Of the things we can do, let’s build the two-lane bridge and tell GRTA if they want more they can pay for it. After all, some of us in Dreamland occasionally want to drive West for the adventure.

Let’s encourage the council and planning commission to actually read the city’s planning documents and minutes of past council and planning commission meetings — start about 1985 and go forward.

Let’s encourage the city attorney to read contracts with developers before bringing the matter up for a vote in a public meeting.

Let’s encourage the leaders of our city to immerse themselves in the history of the city to discover what things have been important to our dreamers for a long time.

And let’s suggest to our leaders that they develop some backbone and enough interest in the voters’ opinions to say, No.

Thank you for the interesting annexation plans for the unincorporated West Village, but — No. We’ll pass on annexation. County zoning is much less dense and less troublesome, so let’s just leave that land alone.

Thanks for the interesting plans for big boxes. We’ll pass on that, too. There are plenty of big boxes within 15 minutes of our homes. We don’t really want any more. But, thanks, anyway.

And thanks for all the interesting ideas for expanding our Dreamland beyond 40,000 build-out population. We really like 40,000 better than 45,000 or 50,000. So, no thanks to any plans to go beyond 40,000.

We wish all you developers much success and unbounded riches in the Wild West. Go West, guys. Leave us in peace, with what remains of our dream.