Butts County
Jackson, Butts County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Butts County. This County, created by Act of the Legislature December 24, 1825, is named for Capt. Sam Butts killed in the Indian War of 1814 at the Battle of Chalibbee. At Indian Springs, now a State Park, were signed the Treaties with the Creeks giving Georgia respectively all lands between the Flint and Ocmulgee Rivers north to the Chattahoochee, and all the remaining Indian lands in the state. Among the first County Officers were: Sheriff Isaac Nolen, Clerk of Superior Court Abel L. Robinson, Clerk of Inferior Court Thomas Thornton, Coroner Sm. B. Smith and Surveyor Willie Terrell. 018-1 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1954
Erected by Georgia Historical Commission
The Story
Butts County was created in 1825 and named for Captain Samuel Butts, killed in 1814 at the Battle of Calabee during the Creek War. Within its bounds lay Indian Springs, where treaties with the Creeks opened vast tracts—first the lands between the Flint and Ocmulgee, then the remaining Creek territory in Georgia—to settlement. The marker also names the county's first officers.
Why it matters
The county's story binds together the Creek War, the controversial Indian Springs treaties, and the wholesale transfer of Creek homelands that reshaped Georgia in the early 19th century.
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Related people
- · Samuel Butts
Related events
- · Battle of Calabee
- · Treaties of Indian Springs
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Community of Buckhead
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Buckhead grew up on the edge of Creek country in the early 1800s, when—by local lore—hunters crossing the Oconee River hung a buck's head in a tree to mark a fine spot to settle. A general-store ledger records the community by 1819, a post office followed by 1823, and the Georgia Railroad reached it in the 1830s, giving rise to a bustling town of stores, mills, churches, and a ten-grade schoolhouse. Fires and the shift from cotton to dairy farming eventually thinned its old streetscape.
The Burning of Greensborough
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In the summer of 1787, amid frontier tensions along the Oconee River, Creek warriors crossed into the young settlement of Greensborough—then just twenty cabins, a log courthouse, and a fort—and burned it, killing many inhabitants. The violence flowed from the disputed Treaty of Shoulderbone Creek of 1786, which the Creeks bitterly resented. Some of those involved were later captured and jailed, though the record of their fate runs out.
Benjamin Hawkins
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Benjamin Hawkins, appointed U.S. Indian agent by President Washington, was so trusted by the Creeks that they called him "the Beloved Man of the Four Nations." A soldier, congressman, and senator, he ran his agency on the Flint River and sought — with a mix of firmness and kindness — to reshape Native life along Euro-American lines. His careful journals, measured by elapsed time on horseback, left the first written record of travel through this region.
Big Spring Park
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Asa Prior, a Virginia-born pioneer, settled this valley and in 1834 bought a tract that included this spring, deeding the spring and ten acres to Cedartown in 1852. Nearby stood Walthall's Indian trading post, where Cherokees gathered and their young people danced the corn dance beneath the cedars. The park was later beautified by a garden club and made the site of a memorial shrine to Senator William Julius Harris.