Long before there was a village, there was the rock. The Muskogee Creek who inhabited the region called it "Lone Mountain." When Spanish explorer Juan Pardo arrived in 1567, he named it Crystal Mountain. By the turn of the 19th century, American settlers had settled on Rock Mountain or Rock Fort Mountain. Muskogee Creek burial mounds in the area date back hundreds of years, evidence of a deep indigenous connection to this landscape. The Treaty of Indian Springs in 1821 opened the region to non-Native settlement, and by 1822, the newly formed DeKalb County encompassed the mountain and its surrounding land. Within a few years, Rock Mountain had become a major travel center, with stagecoach lines running to Milledgeville, Athens, Dahlonega, and Macon.

The village's early prosperity ended violently during the Civil War. From July through November 1864, Union forces scavenged Stone Mountain and its surroundings, taking corn, wheat, cotton, and cattle. On November 15, 1864, between 12,000 and 15,000 Union troops marched through town and destroyed the rail lines in a particularly creative fashion: they heated the rails over burning railroad ties, then twisted them around trees. This technique became known as Sherman's neckties. The Stone Mountain Cemetery, established around 1850, holds roughly 200 unknown Confederate soldiers and 71 known ones, alongside a single Union soldier named James Sprayberry. One grave belongs to George Pressley Trout, buried there with his wife and his horse.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Among the places he called out by name was this granite dome east of Atlanta: "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!" The village took that invocation seriously. Charles Burris, Stone Mountain Village's first African-American mayor, dedicated a Freedom Bell on Main Street in King's honor on February 26, 2000. Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the bell is rung in a public ceremony to commemorate King's legacy. The bell stands on the same Main Street where most buildings date to just after the turn of the 20th century, their original facades still intact.

Those preserved facades have made Stone Mountain Village an irresistible location for film and television productions, riding the wave of Georgia's booming film industry. Parts of Footloose (2011) and Need for Speed (2014) were filmed here. Television crews from The Vampire Diaries, MacGyver, and the Netflix series Stranger Things have all set up shop on Main Street. In NBC's 30 Rock, the beloved character Kenneth Parcell hails from Stone Mountain, and an entire episode follows Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon on a trip to the village. The real town has leaned into it: filming requests are handled by the downtown development authority, and the proceeds fund festivals and community events.

Stone Mountain today is a city of roughly 6,700 people spread across 1.7 square miles, a suburb of Atlanta with a personality all its own. The ART Station Contemporary Arts Center operates out of a 1913 trolley car barn on Manor Drive, hosting shows and the annual Tour of Southern Ghosts each October. The Museum of Miniature Chairs on Main Street displays over 3,000 tiny chairs across three rooms. Golf carts are street-legal here, one of a handful of Georgia communities with that distinction. Among its notable residents: Donald Glover grew up here, Hugh Thompson Jr. (the Vietnam War veteran who saved civilian lives during the My Lai massacre) was raised here, and Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator of the Enola Gay, lived out his later years in Stone Mountain.