Historic Markers in Georgia

Monroe County, GA

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began in 1945 to honor the armed forces that have defended the United States, its name drawn from the blue-star service flags of the World War II home front. Sponsored by the Federated Garden Clubs of Macon with the Garden Club of Georgia and the state transportation department, this marker stands in the middle-Georgia countryside of Monroe County. It joins a chain of tributes running along the state's highways.

Screven, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program began in 1945, when the New Jersey garden clubs planted dogwoods along a highway to honor service members returning from World War II; the blue star echoed the service flags that hung in the windows of homes with someone in uniform. The idea spread nationwide, and markers like this one in Screven, Georgia, were placed by local garden clubs in cooperation with state highway departments. This tribute was sponsored by the Lily Garden Club with the Georgia DOT and the Garden Club of Georgia.

Louisville, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program was launched in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs, who planted trees and set markers along American highways to honor the men and women who served in World War II. The blue star itself came from the service flags families hung in their windows, a single blue star for each loved one away in uniform. This Georgia marker, placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department, extends that living tribute across the roads of Jefferson County.

Ware County, GA

The Blue Star Memorial was created in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs to honor those who served in World War II, its blue star drawn from the service flags families hung for loved ones in uniform. This Ware County marker was placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department. It names the World War II generation directly rather than service in general.

Burke County, GA

Constituted in 1773 by the English-born missionary Rev. Edmund Botsford, this congregation was the second Baptist church founded in Georgia. First established as New Savannah Church some twenty-five miles below Augusta, it moved about ten miles to this spot after the Revolution; the present building dates to around 1875, replacing an earlier church lost to fire. Botsford's own words survive in the record of a single 1773 month spent riding 650 miles, preaching dozens of sermons, and baptizing new members across the Georgia backcountry.

Augusta, GA

This manse of Augusta's First Presbyterian Church was the boyhood home of Woodrow Wilson, who lived here from 1858 to 1870 while his father, Dr. Joseph R. Wilson, served as pastor. A Virginia-born son of the manse, Wilson would rise from Princeton scholar to university president, governor of New Jersey, and, in 1912, 28th President of the United States, leading the nation through World War I and championing the League of Nations. His boyhood neighbor here, Joseph Rucker Lamar, went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Glynn County, GA

A half-mile west lies Boys Estate, a home for boys set on part of the old Elizafield Plantation, once among the rich rice and sugar estates of the Georgia coast. In the early 19th century Elizafield was the domain of Dr. Robert Grant and later his son Hugh Fraser Grant, cultivated intensively in rice and cane; the tabby ruins of a great sugar mill still stand. Given to the state as a park by Cator Woolford in 1935, the tract was set aside in 1945 for the boys' home.

Hinesville, GA

Bradwell Institute traces to 1841, when the newly settled town of Hinesville established an academy under headmaster Colonel James Sharpe Bradwell, its first building raised on the courthouse square for the precise sum of $349.12½. Closed during the Civil War, the school was reopened in 1871 by his son, Captain Samuel Dowse Bradwell, and renamed in the elder Bradwell's honor. A classical boarding and college-preparatory school teaching Latin, Greek, and the sciences, it later became the only high school serving this stretch of coastal Georgia.

Hinesville, GA

In 1871, during the years of rebuilding after the Civil War, Bradwell Institute was founded on this site — one of many local academies that carried formal schooling into communities across the postwar South. The park here remembers Samuel Dowse Bradwell, the institute's founder, whose name the school still carries in Liberty County today. A century later the memorial park itself was built with federal assistance, layering a modern civic project over the town's educational roots.

Eatonton, GA

This marker records the site of a branch of the Bank of the State of Georgia at Eatonton, part of the network of state-chartered banks that financed commerce across the antebellum South. Chartered institutions like it issued their own paper currency and extended credit to planters and merchants in cotton-country towns, tying a rural county seat into the wider financial world of the early republic. Such branch banks were vital, and often fragile, engines of frontier and plantation economies.

Nahunta, GA

Brantley County was carved from neighboring counties by the Georgia legislature in 1920 and named for Benjamin D. Brantley. Local tradition holds that the old Brunswick & Western Railroad running through it marked the southernmost point reached by Sherman's forces, and the marker lists the county's first slate of officers — sheriff, ordinary, clerk, tax collector, and the rest. It stands as a compact civic record of a young south-Georgia county's founding.

Towns County, GA

Rising 4,748 feet, Brasstown Bald is the highest point in Georgia, its bare, grassy crown giving it the Cherokee name Itseyi, 'a place of fresh green.' English-speaking settlers misheard that word and rendered it as 'brass,' the name that stuck. Cherokee tradition tells of a great flood survived by a few families who came to rest atop the mountain in a giant canoe, where the Great Spirit cleared the summit so they could plant and endure until the waters fell.

Screven County, GA

In 1827, on land deeded by the Rev. Peyton L. Wade, Screven County Methodists raised a brick sanctuary they simply called 'Brick Church,' successor to an earlier log meeting house on nearby Rocky Creek. The congregation traced its roots to the Rev. John Crawford, remembered as the founder of Methodism in the community, whose widow later married Wade. The original 1827 building still stands on the site.

Brinson, GA

First settled in the 1850s as Spring Creek, this Decatur County town was renamed for Simeon Brinson, who laid it out in 1889 just as the Alabama Midland Railroad pushed a line through. Brinson boomed as a shipping point for cotton, lumber, and naval stores, the turpentine and pine products that drove the local economy, and was incorporated in 1907. When the sawmills fell silent around 1910 to 1920, the town began a slow decline.

Atlanta, GA

Laid out between 1910 and 1940 around the Capital City Country Club, Historic Brookhaven was Georgia's first planned golf-club community, a leafy enclave of grand homes on Atlanta's north side. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it reflects the early-twentieth-century vogue for suburbs designed around recreation and greenery.

Brooklet, GA

Brooklet took shape in the late 1890s along the new Savannah & Statesboro Railroad, on land owned by A. J. Lee and once known as Nellwood. An early resident, Dr. H. K. Thayer, won the town its name from the brook that ran through it. By its 1907 incorporation, Brooklet had a school, bank, telephone company, churches, and a large lumber mill, growing into a thriving community in eastern Bulloch County.

Quitman, GA

Created by the legislature on December 11, 1858, Brooks County was named for Preston Smith Brooks, the South Carolina congressman and outspoken defender of states' rights who had served in the Mexican War and in Congress. The marker records the county's first slate of officers, from ordinary and sheriff to surveyor and coroner, as its government took shape on the eve of the Civil War.

Milledgeville, GA

Built about 1825 for George T. Brown by English-born architect John Marlor, this Federal-style Milledgeville house served as a hotel for legislators and visitors while the town was Georgia's capital. Merchant Daniel Stetson bought it in 1857, and his family tied it to the secession era: his son-in-law, Judge Daniel Sanford, was clerk of Georgia's Secession Convention. Later famous as the Sanford House Tea Room, it was moved to this site in 1966 to be preserved.

Atlanta, GA

At 3:30 on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate divisions under Gen. John Bell Hood struck the Union Fifteenth Corps astride the Georgia Railroad. The eight brigades of Brown's and Clayton's divisions smashed through four entrenched Federal brigades at the point of the assault, the battle's critical moment, later immortalized in the Atlanta Cyclorama at Grant Park.

Tucker, GA

Near this crossroads stood the justice's office of Browning's Militia District, which Union reports of July 1864 called 'Browning's Court House.' On July 18, as Sherman's armies closed on Atlanta, part of Gen. John A. Logan's Fifteenth Corps detoured through here to support Garrard's cavalry as it tore up the Georgia Railroad near Stone Mountain, camping that night at Henderson's Mill.

Morgan County, GA

The neighboring communities of Brownwood and Centennial grew up along the old stagecoach road between Augusta and Sandtown, where a roadside house once served as an inn and stage stop. The Brown family built up the area with a mill, church, and school, while African American residents founded their own institutions, including Thankful Church and School and Moseley's Chapel. By the late 1800s, Centennial took on its own identity around a new church, cemetery, and academy, and Morgan County placed this marker at its bicentennial to remember them.

Norcross, GA

Built in 1870 beside the newly opened 'Air-Line' Railroad, Norcross's three-story Brunswick Hotel became known as 'Atlanta's Favorite Summer Resort,' where city dwellers escaped the summer heat and dust. With 29 rooms, wide porches, a restaurant, and a park pavilion where a brass band played for dancing, it was the social heart of town, guests and locals alike dressing up to greet the arriving trains. The hotel was torn down at the end of World War II.

Brunswick, GA

During World War II, the J. A. Jones Construction Company's Brunswick shipyard employed more than 16,000 men and women who built 99 steel 'Liberty Ships' between 1942 and 1944. Turning out roughly four of the 447-foot cargo and troop carriers each month, the workers once built seven in a single December as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. Their ships helped keep the Allied supply lines open.

Pembroke, GA

Bryan County, created on December 19, 1793, honors Jonathan Bryan, a Revolutionary patriot and member of Georgia's 1777 Executive Council. Its first, temporary seat was the now-vanished colonial town of Hardwick on the Ogeechee River, laid out in 1755, named for the Lord Chancellor of England, and twice recommended as Georgia's capital. The county seat later moved through Cross Roads and Clyde before settling at Pembroke.

Pembroke, GA

This marker commemorates Jonathan Bryan (1708-1788), the planter, patriot, and public leader for whom Bryan County is named, honoring him as a founder and 'father' of Georgia. It was placed in 1991 by the Adam Brinson I Chapter of the National Society, Colonial Dames of the Seventeenth Century.

Bryan County, GA

Organized in 1869, Bryan Neck Missionary Baptist Church is the oldest African American congregation in lower Bryan County. Its first building, a 'Prayer House,' rose in 1870 beside the white Presbyterian 'Burnt Church,' led by London Harris, a freedman and community spiritual leader who was among its founders and first pastor. The church was renovated and enlarged in 1939 with support from Henry Ford, then building the nearby Harbor school.

Bryan County, GA

On the plantation coast of lower Bryan County, a group of wealthy rice planters organized this Presbyterian congregation, certified by the Presbytery of Georgia in 1830 and built into a frame meeting house by 1839. Fire claimed the first sanctuary, and the present church—the oldest public building in the county—rose in 1885. The founders' world of tidal rice fields depended entirely on enslaved labor, and the old burial ground, Burnt Church Cemetery, still holds the graves of these prominent early families.

Winder, GA

This steam locomotive, No. 208, was built in 1930 and spent its working life on the Gainesville Midland Railroad before the Seaboard Air Line Railroad presented it to Winder and Barrow County in 1959. Retired as one of the last steam engines still running in the region, it was set here as a permanent tribute to the machines that once moved the nation's freight and passengers.

Jefferson, GA

Built in 1907 and last run on the Gainesville Midland Railroad, this steam locomotive was among the final steam-powered engines to operate in the area. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad gave it to the City of Jefferson in 1959 as a lasting exhibit honoring the service such engines rendered the country.

Columbus, GA

Built in 1887 for Dr. William L. Bullard, a pioneering Columbus ear, eye, nose, and throat specialist, this Second Empire Victorian home was designed by a New York architect and stayed in the Bullard family for ninety years. Its guests reportedly included President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Generals George Patton and George Marshall, who dined on "Country Captain," a dish credited to the family cook, Arie Mullins. Listed in the National Register in 1977, it was carefully restored the next year.

Statesboro, GA

Bulloch County was carved from Bryan and Screven Counties in 1796 and named for Archibald Bulloch, a leading Georgia patriot who in early 1776 was chosen president of the colony's Executive Council and became its first provisional governor. He held that post until his sudden death in February 1777, at the height of the Revolution. The marker also records the county's first slate of officers, commissioned in 1796.

Waynesboro, GA

One of Georgia's original counties, Burke was created in 1777 from lands ceded by the Creeks, having earlier been organized as the colonial Parish of St. George. It was named for Edmund Burke, the British statesman and orator whose speeches in Parliament famously defended the American colonies' grievances. The marker lists the county's earliest sheriffs, tax collectors, and clerks from the 1770s and 1780s.

Waynesboro, GA

Historic Burke County, the former St. George's Parish, claims eight Georgia governors by birth, residence, or marriage. Among them were Revolutionary figures like John Houstoun, Declaration signer Lyman Hall, and Edward Telfair, along with later leaders including Herschel V. Johnson—Stephen Douglas's 1860 running mate—and Progressive-era senator and governor Hoke Smith. Together their careers span more than a century of the state's political life.

Bryan County, GA

Established near here in 1830, Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church was the oldest organized congregation in Bryan County, serving the planter families of a lower-Bryan coast that had become one of the most productive rice-growing districts on the south Atlantic. Its burial ground lay beside the wooden sanctuary, and here rest members of prominent early families such as the Clays, McAllisters, and Maxwells. After the church accidentally burned in 1882, a new building rose in 1885 several miles east near Keller.

Jackson, GA

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.

Morgan, GA

Created in 1854 from former Creek lands in southwest Georgia, Calhoun County was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who resigned the vice presidency in 1832 to defend states' rights in the Senate against Daniel Webster. Calhoun also served as secretary of war and secretary of state. The marker lists the county's first officers.

Lumpkin County, GA

About a mile from here lies the Calhoun Gold Mine, said to be where vein gold was first found in Georgia by white prospectors. According to tradition, Benjamin Parks of Dahlonega stumbled on quartz gold while deer hunting in 1828, striking a find so rich it looked like egg yolk. The mine was later sold to Senator John C. Calhoun and worked by his son-in-law Thomas G. Clemson, whose fortune helped found Clemson College.

Whitfield County, GA

Said to have been built around 1814 of bricks made on the site, this house was home to Jesse Callaway from 1852 to 1867 and stayed in his family past 1900. Born in Wilkes County in 1796, Callaway served as a sergeant in the Georgia Militia during the War of 1812, and was the son of a Revolutionary War soldier. Married four times with eighteen children, he left descendants across the state before deeding the house to his son and moving north, where he died in 1875.

Harris County, GA

This 350-acre tract served for roughly 75 years as the official camp of the local Boy Scout councils. Incorporated in 1921 under leaders like W. W. McKenzie and Fred H. Schomburg, the camp was expanded in 1965 when Cason J. Callaway, Jr. helped donate an adjacent tract named Camp Callaway. In the 1950s the council arranged for new camping grounds on West Point Lake, and the marker honors the men whose foresight gave generations of boys a place to learn and grow.

Catoosa County, GA

In early May 1864, Union corps marching from Cleveland, Tennessee, converged near Catoosa Springs to open Sherman's campaign against Atlanta, moving south toward Dalton on May 7. From the yard of the nearby Dr. Lee house, the Federal high command—Sherman, Thomas, Schofield, and others—watched the first troop movements of the drive. The armies pressed on toward Tunnel Hill and Rocky Face Ridge.

Richmond Hill, GA

Canaan Baptist Church, a primarily African American congregation, was organized in 1913 by the Rev. David Boles, Sr. and Deacon Fred Gilbert—the only organized denominational church in what is now Richmond Hill in the early 20th century. Its present sanctuary was built with support from Henry Ford, who developed extensive holdings in the area. Many founding members descended from the enslaved people who had worked the antebellum rice plantations at nearby Cherry Hill and Silk Hope.

Metter, GA

Candler County was created in 1914 from parts of Bulloch, Emanuel, and Tattnall Counties and named for Governor Allen D. Candler (1834–1910). Candler is remembered for preserving and first compiling Georgia's colonial and Confederate records, an early act of state historical stewardship. The marker also lists the new county's first officers.

Bryan County, GA

Fort McAllister, an earthwork fort guarding the Ogeechee River south of Savannah, was the last obstacle in Sherman's March to the Sea. When Union troops stormed it on December 13, 1864, the defenders fought hand-to-hand rather than yield. Captain Nicholas Clinch's refusal to surrender — answering the demand with his sword and absorbing a dozen wounds before being overpowered — became one of the defense's most-remembered moments.

Dublin, GA

In the decades after the Civil War, veterans across the South became pillars of their communities, and Captain Hardy B. Smith of Laurens County was one of them. Wounded at Mechanicsville and losing his right arm, he served two more years before returning to Dublin to farm, hold public office, and help launch the Macon and Dublin Railroad. He completed this Carpenter Gothic home in 1873 — now the oldest house in Dublin still on its original site — and raised ten children here.

Cobb County, GA

During the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Union and Confederate armies grappled across the hills of north Georgia in a series of grinding engagements. Captain Peter Simonson, an Indiana artillery officer serving as a division chief of artillery, was entrenching a battery here on June 16, 1864 when a Confederate marksman killed him.

Vernonburg, GA

In the spring of 1864, Confederate sailors devised a daring night raid to seize a Union gunboat patrolling the Georgia coast. On a dark, stormy June night, boarding parties rowed with muffled oars up to the USS Water Witch, cut through her nettings, and captured her in a fierce hand-to-hand fight that killed their commander, Lt. Thomas Pelot.

Columbus, GA

As Columbus grew into a Chattahoochee River industrial city, this 1902 building housed a succession of food producers — candy makers, syrup refiners, and a hosiery mill — and later the Sol Loeb wholesale grocery firm. Loeb was among the first customers of the Wrigley chewing-gum company and a founding member of the local telephone exchange.

Baxley, GA

Baxley native Caroline Pafford Miller drew on the lives of Georgia's rural pioneers for her fiction. Her 1933 novel Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934, making her the first Georgian to receive the honor.

Franklin County, GA

Instituted in 1797 among the first families to settle Franklin County on Georgia's early frontier, Carroll's Methodist Church took its name from the William Carroll family. The present sanctuary was raised around 1835 and restored in the early 1950s, and generations of local families and ministers, including the long-serving Rev. Nelson Osborn, have worshipped here.

Gilmer County, GA

Organized in 1834 as Cartecay Methodist in the newly opened mountains of Gilmer County, this congregation built its present sanctuary in 1859. During the Civil War, townsmen stood guard over the building at night to protect it from raiders, and among the young men who preached here was the future bishop Warren Candler.

Athens, GA

Cast in 1835 by George Holbrook, a New England bell founder from Medway, Massachusetts, this bell became the timekeeper and public voice of the young University of Georgia — the nation's first state-chartered university, then only a few decades old. For generations it summoned students to lectures, chapel services, and moments of celebration, its ringing woven into the daily rhythm of campus life in Athens. How exactly it made its way south from a Massachusetts foundry to the Georgia frontier remains a genuine campus mystery, the kind of gap in the record that a good marker invites you to wonder about.

Valdosta, GA

This marker tells the story of the spark that lit the modern Civil Rights Movement: in December 1955, seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat, and Black community leaders answered with a boycott of the city's segregated buses. What began as a single day of protest stretched into a 381-day campaign coordinated by the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, whose young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as its voice. The cost was steep — organizers were arrested and King's own home was bombed — but the boycott's discipline and endurance proved that nonviolent mass action could break the machinery of segregation.

Savannah, GA

Savannah passed through the Civil War largely intact, spared the torch when it was surrendered to General Sherman in December 1864 at the end of his March to the Sea and offered to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. In the decades that followed, communities across the South raised memorials to their war dead, and this one reaches for scripture rather than the language of battle. Its lines echo Ezekiel's vision in the valley of dry bones—a prayer that the breath of life return to the fallen—turning a monument to loss into an appeal for resurrection and remembrance.

DeKalb County, GA

Covered or lattice bridges once dotted the eastern United States, their timber trusses roofed to shield the wood from weather. This one, built in the nineteenth century, originally spanned the North Fork of the Oconee River in Athens, Georgia, linking College and Hobson avenues before it was preserved and relocated. Its crisscrossed lattice of planks is a hallmark of a bridge-building age before steel and concrete.

Augusta, GA

When General James Oglethorpe's Georgia trustees ordered this fort raised in 1735, Augusta was the raw edge of Britain's youngest American colony—a fortified trading post on the Savannah River where deerskins moved between backcountry hunters and the coast. Within a generation the settlement had grown enough to build St. Paul's Church tucked beneath the fort's earthen curtain wall in 1750. During the Revolution the British renamed the strongpoint Fort Cornwallis and held it against Patriot forces, making this quiet churchyard ground the site of some of the war's hardest fighting in the Deep South.

Columbia County, GA

This monument honors the men and women of Columbia County, Georgia, who answered their nation's call to arms and gave their lives in service. Its inscription reaches across every conflict in which the county's sons and daughters have fought rather than singling out one war. Community war memorials like this one anchor national sacrifice in the places soldiers called home.

Bostwick, GA

Set on Morgan County's bicentennial, this marker tells the story of Bostwick, a cotton-country community named for the family whose gin anchored its economy. By 1897 the little town — though ten miles off the main Augusta–Atlanta rail line — had its own spur, two cotton gins, a grist mill, a bank, a hotel, a school, and two churches, and it was formally incorporated in 1902. As cotton gave way to sod farms and nurseries, Bostwick's agricultural identity endured into the 21st century.

Buckhead, GA

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.

Pierce County, GA

In the last winter of the Civil War, the Confederacy scrambled to move Union prisoners away from advancing federal armies, throwing up hasty stockades across south Georgia. This site held one such camp, established in mid-November 1864 and crowded with more than five thousand captured Union soldiers before it was abandoned in the first week of January 1865. Its few weeks of existence reflect a prison system stretched far past its limits in a collapsing war effort.

Athens, GA

When the Civil War cut the Confederacy off from European arms, two recent English immigrants, Ferdinand and Francis Cook, set out to build the weapons the South could no longer buy. They first established their armory in New Orleans, but as Union forces closed in on that port city in 1862 they hauled the precious rifle-making machinery inland to Athens, Georgia. Here, along the Oconee River, their works turned out Enfield-pattern rifles for Confederate soldiers, making it one of the few private armories to supply the Southern war effort.