Bartow County
Cartersville, Bartow County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Bartow County. Originally Cass, Bartow County was created by Act of Dec. 3, 1832 from Cherokee County. The name was changed Dec. 6, 1861 to honor Gen. Francis S. Bartow (1816-1861), Confederate political leader and soldier, who fell mortally wounded at the First Battle of Manassas, while leading the 7th and 8th Ga. Vols. of his brigade. His last words were said to be, "They have killed me, boys, but never give up." First officers of this county, commissioned March 9, 1833, were: Benjamin F. Adair, Sheriff; Chester Hawks, Clerk Superior Court; Leathern Rankin, Clerk Inferior Court; Nealy Goodwin, Surveyor; John Pack, Coroner. 008-43 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1956
Erected by Georgia Historical Commission
The Story
Carved out of Cherokee lands in 1832, this northwest Georgia county was first called Cass before the Civil War swept away its old name. In December 1861, with the Confederacy newly formed, Georgia rechristened it for Francis S. Bartow, a Savannah lawyer and politician who had marched off to Virginia at the head of his brigade. Bartow was killed that July at the First Battle of Manassas, one of the earliest prominent Confederate officers to die in the war, and his reported last words—urging his men never to give up—made him a martyr to the Southern cause.
Why it matters
The county's renaming captures how quickly the Civil War reshaped Southern identity, erasing an old political namesake to honor a fallen Confederate hero. Its origins on former Cherokee land also mark the wave of removal and settlement that opened north Georgia in the 1830s.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This corner of northwest Georgia was, within living memory of the people who first held county office here, Cherokee country. In 1832 Georgia carved a new county out of former Cherokee lands and named it Cass. The timing was no accident: these were the years when the state and federal governments were pressing the Cherokee Nation off its homeland, a process that would culminate later in the forced removal known as the Trail of Tears. The opening of north Georgia to white settlement was inseparable from that displacement.
By the time the county's first officers were commissioned in 1833, the land was being surveyed, organized, and settled under new authority. A sheriff, court clerks, a surveyor, and a coroner—the ordinary machinery of American local government—took up their posts on ground that had belonged to another nation only a short while before.
Then came the great rupture. Within a single generation, the sectional crisis over slavery and states' rights tore the country apart. When the Civil War arrived, it reached even into the names on the map, and this county did not keep the name it was born with.
People & events
The county's first chapter is written in the names of its earliest officials, commissioned in March 1833: Benjamin F. Adair as sheriff, Chester Hawks as clerk of the Superior Court, Leathern Rankin as clerk of the Inferior Court, Nealy Goodwin as surveyor, and John Pack as coroner. These were the men who first gave the county its legal shape—unglamorous work, but the foundation on which a community's daily life is built.
The county's second chapter belongs to a man who never governed here at all. In December 1861, with the Confederacy freshly formed, Georgia changed the county's name from Cass to Bartow, honoring General Francis S. Bartow (1816–1861). Bartow was a Confederate political leader and soldier who fell mortally wounded that summer at the First Battle of Manassas in Virginia, while leading regiments of Georgia volunteers in his brigade.
His reported dying words—an exhortation to his men that they had killed him but should never give up—became part of the lore of the early Confederacy. Whether spoken exactly so or polished in the retelling, they helped cast Bartow as one of the South's first martyred officers, and it was that martyrdom, not any local connection, that pinned his name to this Georgia county.
Its place in the American story
The renaming of this county is a small monument to how fast and how deeply the Civil War reshaped Southern identity. In peacetime a county name is inertia itself; it takes something extraordinary to change one. Here the old name was swept aside within months of the war's first major battle, replaced by that of a freshly fallen hero. The map itself was enlisted in the Confederate cause.
Bartow's death at First Manassas placed him among the earliest prominent officers to die in the conflict, at the very battle where Americans on both sides discovered the war would be long and bloody rather than short and glorious. Communities across the South reached for such figures to give the war meaning, and naming a county was one of the most permanent tributes a state could offer.
And beneath the Civil War layer lies the older American story the marker also records: a county born in 1832 from lands taken from the Cherokee. Together the two chapters trace two of the defining currents of nineteenth-century America—the dispossession that opened the frontier, and the sectional war that nearly ended the nation.
If you visit
A county marker like this one asks you to think in layers. There is no battlefield here to walk, but there is a story of names to carry with you—the fact that the ground under your feet was called Cass before it was called Bartow, and Cherokee land before it was called either.
Cartersville and the surrounding countryside sit in the rolling terrain of northwest Georgia, a region shaped first by the Cherokee and then by the waves of settlement and war that followed. As you travel it, notice how many local names, roads, and old institutions reach back to those founding decades.
This marker pairs naturally with the many Civil War and Cherokee-history sites scattered across north Georgia. Treat it as an orientation point on a longer road trip: a reminder that a place can be renamed by a war fought hundreds of miles away, and that the tidy list of a county's first officers rests on a much harder story of who lived here before them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Francis S. Bartow
- · Benjamin F. Adair
- · Chester Hawks
- · Leathern Rankin
- · Nealy Goodwin
- · John Pack
Related events
- · First Battle of Manassas
- · Creation of Cass County (1832)
- · Renaming to Bartow County (1861)
Themes & tags
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