Winder, Georgia, Is a Rural, Middle-Class City in a Rapidly Developing Area

The shooting at Apalachee High School on Wednesday took place in a rural, unincorporated area between the cities of Atlanta and Athens in Georgia.

The school — where a 14-year-old student fatally shot four people and injured nine others — is on the edge of Winder, which is home to about 20,000 people. The city is roughly 50 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta and about 25 miles west of Athens.

The area around the school, once largely farmland nestled in the Georgia pines, has been developing rapidly in the last 15 years, as new buildings have cropped up along its winding, two-lane roads, according to Winder’s mayor, Jimmy Terrell.

Winder is the seat of Barrow County, which has nearly doubled in population to 83,500 since 2000, according to census data.

Winder is a family-oriented, middle-income community with an aging population, Mr. Terrell said. The area has not had a crime of “this magnitude” since a series of murders in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Terrell said in a phone interview.

In Winder, about 60 percent of the population is white, about 20 percent is Black and about 15 percent is Latino, according to census figures. The area has grown more diverse in recent years, Mr. Terrell said. The city’s median household income is about $57,000, according to the census. About one in five people in the city have attained a bachelor’s degree, census data shows. Barrow County as a whole has a larger share of families with children than other places in Georgia and the U.S., according to the data.

The city leans Republican, Mr. Terrell said. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald J. Trump won Barrow County, which surrounds the city, with about 71 percent of the vote.

Apalachee High School opened in 2000, and has about 1,800 students in grades nine through 12.

Robert Gebeloff and Emmett Lindner contributed reporting.