Historic Sites in Baldwin County

The history of Baldwin County

Baldwin County was created on May 11, 1803, from land the Muscogee (Creek) Nation ceded in the 1802 Treaty of Fort Wilkinson, and was distributed to white settlers through the state land lottery. It is named for Abraham Baldwin, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, a U.S. senator from Georgia and founder of the University of Georgia. Milledgeville, laid out along the Oconee River as a planned capital, is the county seat, and for more than six decades it was the seat of state government. The legislature first met in the new statehouse on November 2, 1807. The state penitentiary opened in the city in 1817, and the General Assembly authorized Georgia's first asylum for the mentally ill in 1837. In January 1861 delegates meeting in Milledgeville voted to take Georgia out of the Union, and in November 1864 troops under General William T. Sherman occupied the town, burned the penitentiary and staged a mock session of the legislature. The capital moved to Atlanta in 1868. Visitors can still see the Old Governor's Mansion, the Old Capitol Building used by Georgia Military College, and Memory Hill Cemetery, burial place of writer Flannery O'Connor, whose farm Andalusia lies just outside town. Longtime congressman Carl Vinson also called the county home.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orgen.wikipedia.org