Smokey and the Bandit Turns 50: Georgia’s 3 Forgotten Film Towns

Jonesboro and McDonough: The Real Backroads of the Bandit

Read more: The $420 Secret: 20 American Towns Flying Under the Radar

Jonesboro, Georgia — the 4,700-person seat of Clayton County, roughly 16 miles south of downtown Atlanta on U.S. Route 41 — gave director Hal Needham exactly what he needed in July 1976: authentic Southern infrastructure and a sheriff’s department willing to cooperate. Main Street and Mill Street in Jonesboro served as the backdrop for chase sequences that defined the film’s gritty, small-town energy.

These were not decorated sets. The storefronts were open. The roads were real Georgia asphalt. Jonesboro’s Flint River corridor provided the swampy, low-lying geography that screenwriter James Lee Barrett had written into the margins. The Southern-fried, often-seedy but always entertaining crime films set in redneck towns surrounded by swamps and crossed only by lonely highways required exactly this kind of location — and Jonesboro delivered it cheaply, at roughly zero set-dressing cost.

Twenty minutes northeast of Jonesboro, the production crew moved to McDonough, Georgia, the county seat of Henry County. Henry County’s current population sits near 250,000, but in 1976 it was barely a third of that — a sleepy courthouse town surrounded by cattle farms and pine stands. After several stops in the Jonesboro area, the production team headed over to McDonough to the town square — a really interesting area that warranted significant time.

McDonough’s square, anchored by the Henry County Courthouse (built 1897), still stands nearly unchanged. The two-story commercial facades along Keys Ferry Street look remarkably similar to their 1976 appearance. Current property values on the square average $285,000 per commercial unit — roughly what a 1-bedroom condo costs in Midtown Atlanta — making the area surprisingly affordable for film tourism investment.

Lakewood Fairgrounds and the Atlanta Machinery Behind the Myth

The Lakewood Fairgrounds in southeast Atlanta, Fulton County, served as the film’s organizational hub — the place where trucks staged, stunt drivers coordinated, and the fictional Texarkana beer run took logistical shape on camera. The fairgrounds, originally opened in 1916 and spanning roughly 165 acres near Lakewood Avenue, were already showing their age by 1976. The movie locations, from Lakewood Fairgrounds in Atlanta to Main and Mill Street in Jonesboro, captured a rural feel that no studio lot could replicate.

The fairgrounds were formally closed in 1995. Much of the site was redeveloped, and the grandstand structure was demolished. Today, the land sits in a mixed-use limbo — portions are used for industrial storage, portions remain vacant. The median household income in the surrounding Lakewood Heights neighborhood is approximately $38,000 annually, about 53 percent of the Atlanta metro median. The neighborhood has never fully recovered from the fairground’s closure, which removed hundreds of seasonal jobs and tens of thousands of annual visitors.

Researchers documenting the filming locations have been racing the clock. Enthusiasts revisiting the locations used to film the 1970s trucking film, including sites connected to Hooper and the Gator franchise, have found some sites unrecognizable and others eerily preserved. The Trans Am jumps, the county road chases, and the truck-stop confrontations — all of them happened in real places with real histories.