Historic Sites in Bacon County

The history of Bacon County

Bacon County was created by an act of the Georgia legislature on July 27, 1914, from parts of Appling, Pierce and Ware counties. Its creation required a constitutional amendment, because Georgia voters had capped the number of counties in 1904. The county is named for Augustus Octavius Bacon, a Confederate veteran who served four terms in the U.S. Senate, was president pro tempore of that body in 1912, and died in office in February 1914, only months before the county bearing his name was formed. Alma, incorporated in 1906, is the county seat. The surrounding pine forests made naval stores and turpentine the backbone of the early economy, and in later decades the county developed a large blueberry industry. Several buildings from its early twentieth-century growth are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, including the 1919 Bacon County Courthouse, added in 1980, and the Alma Depot, added in 1983. Camp Ground Methodist Church traces its roots to the early 1800s, well before the county existed. Bacon County is also the birthplace of novelist Harry Crews, born in 1935, whose memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978) recalls growing up on the area's small farms.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com