At 90, Peachtree City’s founder Joel Cowan can sit in his Peachtree City home and describe the time he drove around with two cases of dynamite in the back of his car. Cowan was trying to drain swampy land where beavers kept rebuilding their dams almost as quickly as he could destroy them. He was trying to figure out where a lake should go, where a golf course might fit, how water should flow and, on a much larger scale, how to turn thousands of acres of mostly fallow farmland and pine trees into something that did not yet exist. “I learned to use ditching dynamite,” Cowan said. He and equipment owner Tom Mitchell would push dynamite into the beaver dams, run the wires away and take cover. “I’d get behind a tree over there, blow the dam all at once,” Cowan said. “The beavers could build it back virtually in 24 hours,” he said. “I couldn’t get ahead of them.” It is one of many stories Joel and Geri Cowan can tell about the improbable beginnings of Peachtree City — stories involving farmers, bootleggers, a prefab house, a party-line telephone, a $1,200 lakefront lot, a young mayor named by the Georgia Legislature and a newlywed couple barely out of college who moved into a place that, by almost any modern definition, was the middle of nowhere. Nearly seven decades later, the Cowans are still here. And this year, for the first time in a long time, age has begun making itself felt. “We’ve been lucky up to really this year,” Joel Cowan said. “Then I start falling apart.” Joel and…
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