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'Zombie' city straddling Gwinnett-Hall line won't die

Rest Haven is a city that its leaders have been trying to dissolve for years – but it won't go away.

REST HAVEN, Ga. — If there was such a thing as a zombie city, this town could qualify.

Rest Haven is a city that its leaders have been trying to dissolve for years – but it won’t go away.

There are few Georgia cities harder to find that Rest Haven. It sits alongside the city limits of Buford, but there’s no identifying signage of its own.

Ask the Internet to find city hall, and it may take you to a cell phone tower adjacent to "City Hall Road," a street that no longer leads to its namesake.

Yet within its unmarked boundaries, the city of Rest Haven is home to only a few souls.

"Just to guess, maybe 20," speculated Jennifer Gaultney, a resident. The 2010 census showed 62 people, before part of it was annexed into Buford.

Many of them apparently have little use for their hometown as a municipality.

"They have been trying to disband the city," said Sen. Renee Unterman, who represents Rest Haven. "I think the city of Buford will eventually annex almost all of the city of Rest Haven."

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Yet the tiny town has refused to die, despite repeated attempts to obliterate its nebulous boundaries from the map. The city of Buford already handles most of Rest Haven’s municipal services – making its undead neighbor a city, mostly in name only.

"Since there's so few of us, we really don’t have any issues out here," Gaultney said. Like the Georgia legislature, Gaultner is in no hurry to dissolve Rest Haven – even if the city does next to nothing.

Gaultney directed 11Alive's Doug Richards to a storefront bearing a no-frills sign that read: "Rest Haven City Hall," a mile and a half north of City Hall Road. The door was locked.

In this city, that made perfect sense.

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