Area History

This area of West Georgia has been inhabited for approximately 12,000 years.  Indians brought the earliest man-made change to the lands of West Georgia.  Mississippian populations included several tribes we know today – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Choctaw and – the last to arrive – the Muscogi or “Creek” Indians.  Creek Indians occupied the lands of West Georgia just before the English began to settle coastal Carolina and Georgia in the 1600s and 1700s.

Creek Indians signed the first in a long series of treaties in 1733.  In 1825, pressured by pioneers anxious to expand, the federal government made a land purchase from the Georgia Lower Creek, despite opposition from Alabama Upper Creek.  With this purchase, the United States gained territory in exchange for that given up by Georgia in northern Alabama and Mississippi in 1802.  In 1826, the Lower Creek moved west as surveyors laid out land lots.  Large numbers of white settlers arrived following the 1827 land lottery, built houses and established farms and towns.  Angry over the treaty and the encroachment of settlers, the Upper Creek waged the Creek Indian War of 1836, which ended in their defeat and final removal from eastern Alabama.

Settlers moved into West Georgia in search of fertile soil, having exhausted lands to the east.  For the most part, they came from the Carolinas, Virginia and East Georgia.  With the labor of slaves, large planters, typically people of means, converted much of the land to cotton production, the dominant cash crop.  By 1860, West Georgia was among the wealthiest and largest slaveholding areas of Georgia.