Over the years, GA 176 has seen three major changes and one minor one during its history. All of these changes were sweeping ones. The earliest of those happened decades ago and may come as a surprise to those that have only lived in the area since the 1970's.

GA 176 had not always continued north of the Lost Mountain Store, In fact, this portion known to most as Mars Hill Road, did not actually become part of the highway until 1969 when several other roads in the area, mostly over in nearby Paulding County, also began to be reshuffled.  

Even further back, this portion of the roadway had been relocated from where it had previously entered Cobb County along present-day Old Dallas Road and Tibbitts Road.  At the time, this portion of GA 176 was completely unpaved.  The paving of the road, completed around 1960, included the relocation of the route further west to join GA 120 on the county line.

GA 176 in 1959. Note the unpaved part entering Paulding County along Old Dallas Road that it is a mile longer than on the map above this one and intersects just west of where the route currently crosses GA 120.

15 years after GA 176 was relocated to and extended along Mars Hill Road, another major event occured along the route that came in the form of a southward extension. This extension came as a result of the completed relocation of U.S. 278 around Powder Springs as the Thornton Road extension in 1986, officially named C.H. James Parkway.

What happened was that originally GA 176 terminated at U.S. 278 in Powder Springs, but U.S. 278 was moved west of there and the old route renumbered as GA 6 Business. To clarify the renumbering, GA 6 is the state overlap of U.S. 278 in the area. In order to make sure that GA 176 continued to end at U.S. 278, GA 176 was extended southward along the new GA 6 Business (Old U.S. 278) and along a new connector road along reconstructed Westside Road so that both routes would end at U.S. 278 directly, GA 6 Business to complete the business loop and GA 176 to connect directly to U.S. 278.   

An interesting arrangement, the two routes were grouped together for a long period of time until very unusual events began to happen in Powder Springs and Clarkdale, where the two routes joined the new Westside connector. As the last of three major events unfolding on GA 176, the first strange occurance was when Powder Springs saw fit to build a by-pass north of downtown (labeled in blue on the first map). This by-pass, built next to the abandoned railroad that is now the Silver Comet Trail, was to connect Powder Springs Road (Old GA 5) east of downtown to U.S. 278 to the west running immediately north of the existing GA 6 Business and ending at the former transition back to U.S. 278 before U.S. 278 was relocated west of there in 1992 and GA 6 Business extended along the old route.  Built by the county, this road was never designed to be a state route and built mostly with county funds. Additionally, the design of the roadway was not entirely to state standards.  Part of the project included a reconfiguration of the existing Powder Springs Road and GA 6 Business intersection to the south, which had previously been a Y-intersection.  Though unrelated at the time, this new road would become a major player in what happened next.

Meanwhile, while Powder Springs was finishing up its new by-pass, Austell had finally exhausted its resources on a legal battle to keep Norfolk Southern from building a huge rail yard right where the Westside Road Connector was. Respectively, the Westside Road Connector was indeed part of GA 176 and SR 6 Business and had been built to provide an adequate connection for the Powder Springs Business route and the GA 176 extension.  Austell, desperate for development and trying to rise above the "inner ring suburb" stigma, had been trying for years to develop the property along Westside Road around the old Coats and Clark mill, which they had failed to redevelop as the "Threadmill Mall".  Opposed by nearly everyone but the rail company, whose legal resources and political muscle were too strong for Austell, the city finally gave in after the rail company promised a big cash payment to Austell and the rail company was committed to relocating Westside Road around the proposed railyard, moving the connector south of the Clarkdale community, now part of Austell.

Click on a thumbnail above to view full-size maps of GA 176 in Powder Springs before and after. The first map represents the road prior to 2001 and the second after 2001. The blue line represents the Powder Springs By-Pass. Apologies on the Clarkdale error.

Thus, in late 2000 and early 2001, the Westside Connector, which had opened in 1986 as the connection that would form part of SR 6 Business through Powder Springs, was completely removed for the railyard. Today, there is literally no trace of the road, and a large embankment covers the area just west of the intersection where the Westside Connector joined Old U.S. 278.  New signs were already in place to relocate GA 6 Business and GA 176, which would have caused GDOT to take back all of Old U.S. 278 through Clarkdale to utilize the connector.  Sadly, as a 15-year old road was wiped off the face of the earth, GDOT had other plans.  In May 2001, all of GA 6 Business through Powder Springs was decommissioned.  The state had just replaced two very old bridges on the westernmost extension of the route that overlapped US 278 and they saw no need to retain the route any longer.  

Despite the hatchet job that GDOT and the rail company had done to Powder Springs, oddly, the new connector road that replaced Westside Road was retained as a new banner route, GA 6 Spur. In a fit of efficiency, on the new GA 6 Business markers that were already in place, the Business banner was taped over with "Spur", while all the newer GA 176 markers were recycled to mark the new route.

The removal of Westside Road and the decommissioning of GA 6 Business left GA 176 with nowhere to go, so GA 176 was truncated to the Powder Springs By-Pass and relocated along the new road west of the truncated portion, also known as Richard D. Sailors Parkway, to join U.S. 278 to the west. This left Powder Springs for the first time with no state routes through the town itself or directly leading to it and had also effectively resulted in the turnback of three miles of GA 176 along Old U.S. 278 (Austell-Powder Springs Road) and a small part of New Macland Road.

Of the three major events that changed the highway significantly, a previously mentioned less significant also occured along the route earlier when GDOT came along in the early 1990's and leveled the steep hill where GA 176 meets GA 120 (Dallas Highway) in the Lost Mountain community. The intersection improvement was one of the first stages of four-laning GA 120 by rebuilding the intersection of the two highways. Since this was the site of the Lost Mountain Store, which sat at the northeast corner where the routes met, for a while, the store suddenly sat up high looking over the intersection that it previously had been level with protected by a guardrail before the store became part of a strip mall as previously discussed. On the road itself, GA 176 was detoured along several county roads to the west while the work was underway. No major events have occured along GA 176 since that time.