| The Columbia Gazetteer of North America. 2000. |
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| Georgia |
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Georgia, state (59,441 sq mi/153,953 sq km; 1995 est. pop. 7,200,882), SE U.S., the last of the 13 colonies to be founded (1733);  Atlanta (also largest city); 32°25'N 81°47'W. Other cities include Columbus, Savannah, Macon, Brunswick, and Albany. Ga. is bounded on the N by Tenn. and N.C., on the E by S.C. and the Atlantic Ocean, on the S by Fla., and on the W by Ala. Several isls. that make up part of the Sea Isls. chain, including Jekyll, Sapelo, St. Simons, and Sea Isl., lie off Ga.’s coastline. Ga. is the largest state E of the Mississippi R. and has 3 main topographical areas in addition to the coastal isls. Extending inland from the coast is a low coastal plain that covers the S 1/2 of the state. In mountainous N Ga. are the Appalachian Plateau, the valley and ridge region, and the Blue Ridge region. Bridging these 2 sects. and embracing about 1/3 of the state is the Piedmont foothill region in central Ga. In the transition area bet. the Piedmont and Coastal Plain regions lies the Fall Zone, or Fall Line, which became home to 3 large mfg. cities that benefited from water power to drive industry; they are Augusta, Macon, and Columbus. The Fall Zone is also a rich mineral area; kaolin and other clays were deposited in near-shore environments when the Coastal Plain was ocean; weathered and decomposed Appalachian Mt. rock material lies close to the surface. The state has a humid subtropical climate characterized by hot summers (average temperature 78°F/26°C) and mild winters (average temperature 44°F/7°C) with only a few inches of snowfall in the mts. and Piedmont region. The annual precipitation, highest (up to c.75 in/191 cm) in the extreme NE Blue Ridge, averages c.50 in/127 cm, with spring and fall relatively dry. There is a long growing season ranging (N-S) from 200 to 250 days except in the mts. (where it is c.180 days). Ga. is well drained by many rivers, including the Savannah, which forms the boundary with S.C.; the Ocmulgee and the Oconee, which merge in the SE to form the Altamaha; the Chattahoochee, which forms part of the Ala. boundary and joins with the Flint in the extreme SW corner of the state to form the Apalachicola; and the Saint Marys, which rises in the large Okefenokee Swamp and forms part of the Ga.-Fla. state line. Although the trade and service industries supply the majority of jobs in Ga., mfg. and agr. remain important to the state’s economy. Cotton, 1st planted in Ga. in 1733, reemerged as Ga.’s chief cash crop in 1994. Ga. is the 2d-largest producer of cotton nationally and is easily the nation’s largest producer of peanuts. Tobacco is the main crop in the central and S sects. of the state, and peanuts rank 1st in the SW. Soybeans are also grown. Livestock raising accounts for the largest share of farm income; broilers, eggs, and cattle are the most important prods. The mfg. of textiles and textile prods. has long been Ga.’s leading industry, centering mainly around Columbus, Augusta, Macon, and Rome, but has declined in recent years. Other major mfg. includes transportation equip. (esp. aircraft), food prods., paper prods., and chemicals. Motor vehicle mfg. takes place in and around Atlanta. Much of Ga. is heavily forested with pine, and the state is a leading producer in the South of lumber and pulpwood. The state is rich in minerals, but mining is not as important as mfg. and agr. The most valuable minerals produced are various types of clays, including kaolin, stone, iron ore, sand, and gravel. Ga. is famous for its fine marble. Ga. ranks 5th nationally in nonfuel mineral production value, with kaolin accounting for 62%; and ranking 1st among all 50 states in kaolin and dimension stone; 2d in natl. bauxite production; 3d in mica and iron oxide pigments; 4th in feldspar; and 9th in masonry cement. With its moderate winter climate and its Southern charm and beauty, the state is a popular vacation area. The Sea Isls. are especially noted for their picturesque resorts. Warm Springs, established with the help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the treatment of poliomyelitis, is now a historical landmark. Ga.’s other attractions include Okefenokee Swamp, a large wilderness area; Chattahoochee and Oconee natl. forests, with facilities for hunting and fishing; Chickamauga and Chattanooga Natl. Military Park; Kennesaw Mt. Natl. Battlefield Park; and Stone Mountain Memorial, near Atlanta, on which is carved the likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. The Creek and Cherokee inhabited the Ga. area when Hernando De Soto and his expedition passed through the region c.1540. The Spanish later established missions and garrisons on the Sea Isls. In 1663, Charles II of England made a grant of land that included Ga. to the 8 proprietors of Carolina. However, Spain claimed the whole E 1/2 of the present U.S. and protested the grant. The English ignored the protest, and the Eng.-Span. contest for the territory bet. the Eng. Charleston (S.C.) hq. and the Span. St. Augustine (Fla.) fort continued intermittently for almost a cent. In June 1732, the Eng. philanthropist James E. Oglethorpe received a charter from George II (for whom the colony was named) to settle the colony of Ga. (as a refuge for Eng. debtors) and form a board of trustees to manage it. The 1st colonists, led by Oglethorpe, reached the mouth of the Savannah R. in Feb. 1733. On a bluff c.18 mi/29 km upstream, the colonists laid out the 1st town, Savannah. In 1739, war broke out bet. Spain and England. Fighting occurred in Ga., and in 1742, near Fort Frederica on St. Simons Isl., Oglethorpe defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Bloody Marsh, thereby effectively ending Spain’s claim to the land N of the St. Marys R. Ga.’s early settlers included English, Welsh, Scots Highlanders, Germans, Italians, Piedmontese, and Swiss; Jews, Catholics, and settlers from other Amer. colonies were at 1st barred. At 1st slavery was prohibited, but this and other restrictions impeded the colony’s growth, and by the time Ga. became a royal colony in 1754, most of the restrictions had been abolished. Ga. fitted well into the Br. mercantile system, exporting rice, indigo, deerskins, lumber, naval stores, beef, and pork to England and buying there the manufactured articles it needed. Ga.’s citizens were slower to resent those acts of the crown that exasperated the other colonies, but by June 1775, Georgian patriots had begun to organize, and the following month delegates were elected to the 2d Continental Congress. Ga.’s colonists were about equally divided into Loyalists and patriots during the Amer. Revolution, but the patriots, exposed to Loyalist Fla. on the S and the Indians on the W, fared badly. In Dec. 1778, the British captured Savannah, and by the end of 1779 held every important town in Ga. After Amer. independence had been won, Ga. was the 1st Southern state to ratify (1788) the Constitution. Ga. came into conflict with the Federal govt. over states’ rights when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Chisholm vs. Georgia (1793), that an individual could sue a state, a decision equally distasteful to other states as well as to Ga. (This decision was later nullified by the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.) Further difficulties with the Federal govt. stemmed from the related issues of the removal of Native Americans and land speculation. In 1827, the Cherokee in Ga. set themselves up as an independent nation. The U.S. Supreme Court held (1832) that the state had no jurisdiction over the Cherokee, but President Andrew Jackson declined to support the Chief Justice, and in 1838 the Cherokee were forced to migrate W to govt. land in present-day Okla. The path of their journey is known as the Trail of Tears. With the invention of the cotton gin (1793) by Eli Whitney, Ga. began to prosper as a cotton-growing state. Cotton was grown under the plantation system with labor supplied by slaves. By the 1840s a textile industry was established in the state. Although Ga. was committed to slavery before the Civil War, state leaders opposed secession. However, successive defeats on the natl. scene, culminating in the election of Lincoln as president, fostered separatist sentiment in the state. On Jan. 19, 1861, Ga. seceded from the Union and shortly afterward joined the Confederacy. The coast was soon blockaded by the Union navy, and in April 1862, Fort Pulaski (which had been seized by the state in Jan. 1861) was recaptured by Union forces. Ga. became a major Civil War battlefield when, in 1864, Union Gen. W. T. Sherman launched his successful Atlanta campaign. On Nov. 15, 1864, Sherman set fire to Atlanta, and his subsequent march through Ga. to the sea, culminating (Dec.) in the fall of Savannah, left in its path a scene of great destruction. During Reconstruction, Ga. initially refused to ratify the 14th Amendment and was consequently placed under military rule. During the period of military rule Rufus B. Bullock, a radical Republican, was elected governor. After the legislature approved the 15th Amendment (the 13th and 14th having been ratified earlier), Ga. was readmitted (1870) to the Union, and Bullock resigned. The textile industry recovered from the effects of the war and was expanding by the 1880s. Atlanta, which had succeeded Milledgeville as capital in 1868, grew into a thriving industrial city, largely due to its importance as the center of an expanding regional RR network. Whereas Savannah had traditionally been the leading city in the state, that status shifted to Atlanta in the early 20th cent. as its pop. exceeded 100,000 for the 1st time. The Atlanta region reached 1,000,000 inhabitants in 1960, and approaches 4,000,000 in the late 1990s. The effect of the war on agr.—which formerly had depended on slave labor—was more serious. The breakup of large plantations resulted in the rise of tenant farming and sharecropping, systems often accompanied by poverty and abuse. A farm depression began in Ga. long before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The state weathered the Depression, but its subsequent history was marked by political and racial conflict. In 1941, Gov. Eugene Talmadge caused nationwide commotion by discharging 3 state univ. educators who were alleged to have advocated racial equality in the schools. Talmadge was defeated in the 1942 Democratic primary by Ellis G. Arnall. Under Arnall’s administration, Ga. became the 1st state to grant the vote to 18-year-olds, and in 1946 (on the strength of a U.S. Supreme Court decision) Afr.-Americans voted for the 1st time in the Ga. Democratic primary. Among Arnall’s other administrative acts was the adoption of a new constitution in Aug. 1945, which contained a provision for Ga.’s notorious co.-unit system. This system for nominating state officials in Democratic primaries led to the political control of urban areas by sparsely populated rural areas. The integration of public schools, following the 1954 Supreme Court decision, was strenuously opposed by many Georgians. However, in 1961 the legislature abandoned a “massive resistance” policy, and Ga. became the 1st state in the deep South to proceed with integration without a major curtailment of its public school system; however, racial tensions persisted. Ga.’s co.-unit system (held constitutional by the Supreme Court in April 1950) was finally abolished by Federal court order in 1962. In the 1972, Andrew Young became the 1st Afr.-Amer. elected to the U.S. Congress and later became mayor of Atlanta. Ga.’s urban centers, esp. Atlanta, have experienced rapid growth over the past 40 years. About 1/2 of the jobs and pop. in Ga. are located in the 20 cos. of the Atlanta metropolitan area. This urban growth has expanded the cultural and economic gap bet. Ga.’s rural and urban areas. Ga.’s constitution provides for an elected governor who serves for a term of 4 years. The legislature, called the general assembly, is made up of a Senate with 56 members and a House of Representatives with 180 members. Members of both houses are elected to terms of 2 years. Ga. sends 11 representatives and 2 senators to the U.S. Congress and has 13 electoral votes. The Democratic party in Ga. has dominated that state’s politics since the end of Reconstruction. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and the 39th president of the U.S., was governor of Ga. from 1970–1974. In 1990, Zell Bryan Miller, a Democrat, was elected governor. Leading educational institutions include the Univ. of Ga., at Athens; Ga. Inst. of Technology, Ga. State Univ., Emory Univ., Clark Col., Morehouse Col., Spelman Col., and Morris Brown Col., at Atlanta; Agnes Scott Col., at Decatur; Mercer Univ. and Wesleyan Col., at Macon; Savannah Col. of Art and Design; and several other state univs. Ga. has 159 cos.: Appling, Atkinson, Bacon, Baker, Baldwin, Banks, Barrow, Bartow, Ben Hill, Berrien, Bibb, Bleckley, Brantley, Brooks, Bryan, Bulloch, Burke, Butts, Calhoun, Camden, Candler, Carroll, Catoosa, Charlton, Chatham, Chattahoochee, Chattooga, Cherokee, Clarke, Clay, Clayton, Clinch, Cobb, Coffee, Colquitt, Columbia, Cook, Coweta, Crawford, Crisp, Dade, Dawson, Decatur, DeKalb, Dodge, Dooly, Dougherty, Douglas, Early, Echols, Effingham, Elbert, Emanuel, Evans, Fannin, Fayette, Floyd, Forsyth, Franklin, Fulton, Gilmer, Glascock, Glynn, Gordon, Grady, Greene, Gwinnett, Habersham, Hall, Hancock, Haralson, Harris, Hart, Heard, Henry, Houston, Irwin, Jackson, Jasper, Jeff Davis, Jefferson, Jenkins, Johnson, Jones, Lamar, Lanier, Laurens, Lee, Liberty, Lincoln, Long, Lowndes, Lumpkin, McDuffie, McIntosh, Macon, Madison, Marion, Meriwether, Miller, Mitchell, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Murray, Muscogee, Newton, Oconee, Oglethorpe, Paulding, Peach, Pickens, Pierce, Pike, Polk, Pulaski, Putnam, Quitman, Rabun, Randolph, Richmond, Rockdale, Schley, Screven, Seminole, Spalding, Stephens, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taliaferro, Tattnall, Taylor, Telfair, Terrell, Thomas, Tift, Toombs, Towns, Treutlen, Troup, Turner, Twiggs, Union, Upson, Walker, Walton, Ware, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Wheeler, White, Whitfield, Wilcox, Wilkes, Wilkinson, and Worth. | | | | Capital city or county seat is shown by the symbol |
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| | | The Columbia Gazetteer of North America. Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press. |
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