Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Lithonia, GA

Lithonia is a small city in eastern DeKalb County, Georgia, about 18 miles east of downtown Atlanta in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

The name Lithonia means 'city of stone,' from the Greek word lithos for stone, and the city's motto is the 'City of Granite.'

Lithonia began in 1805 as a small crossroads settlement of farmers and was known in its early days simply as 'Cross Roads,' an intersection community identified as early as 1840.

The arrival of the Atlanta-Augusta railroad in 1845 allowed the area's granite-quarrying industry to flourish, with local quarries served by the Georgia Railroad and the Atlanta, Stone Mountain & Lithonia Railway.

The bedrock beneath the city is its own namesake formation, Lithonia gneiss, a metamorphic rock into which the younger granite of nearby Stone Mountain later intruded.

At the 2020 census Lithonia had 2,662 residents living in 1,007 households, packed into less than one square mile of land.

Lithonia's population jumped 38 percent between 2010 and 2020, reversing a long slide that had taken it from 2,637 people in 1980 down to 1,924 in 2010.

The 441-acre Lithonia Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, preserves a granite-and-brick commercial core and residential neighborhoods whose period of significance runs from 1845 to 1964.

Lithonia is one of the gateways to the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, a federally designated landscape of granite outcrops, lakes and trails lying largely within neighboring Stonecrest.

Lithonia Lighting, which grew into one of North America's largest manufacturers of lighting fixtures, was founded in the city in 1946 before relocating to nearby Conyers in the 1950s.