Collegedale Mayor Katie Lamb came to Southern Adventist College to teach nursing 44 years ago when the city of Collegedale, true to its name, was a small college town that was home to McKee Baking Co. and only a few thousand year-round residents.
“Four Corners (at the intersection of Ooltewah-Ringgold Road and Apison Pike) was still farmland, and there was hardly any traffic except when the bakery changed shifts,” recalled Lamb, who retired as Southern’s dean of nursing a decade ago.
But as Southern grew into a full-scale university, McKee Foods became America’s biggest privately owned bakery and Hamilton County’s population has shifted to the east, Collegedale has emerged as the fastest growing city in the Chattanooga region. Collegedale’s population has doubled since 1990 and grew nearly 30 percent from the last official census in 2010 through last year, according to new population estimates released by the U.S. Bureau of Census.
With the opening of nearly 500 more apartments this year and the new four-lane Apison Pike extension to Interstate 75, Collegedale is poised to overtake Red Bank to become Hamilton County’s fourth biggest city by the next official census count in 2020.
While Collegedale boasts the fastest population growth rate, its neighboring and bigger municipalities around it also grew faster than the rest of Tennessee in the past five years. The city of Chattanooga, which lost more than 10 percent of its population in the 1980s, rebounded to regain all of that loss and then some and grew 5.3 percent from 2010 to 2015 – easily outpacing Tennessee’s overall population gain of 4 percent in the same period.