Historic Sites in Bartow County

The history of Bartow County

Bartow County was created on December 3, 1832, from Cherokee County, part of the Cherokee Nation's lands that Georgia seized and distributed to white settlers through land and gold lotteries before the Cherokees' forced removal. It was first named Cass County, for Secretary of War Lewis Cass, but in 1861 the legislature renamed it for Colonel Francis S. Bartow, the first Georgia officer killed at the First Battle of Manassas. The original county seat, Cassville, was destroyed by Union troops in November 1864, and the seat moved to Cartersville in 1867. Woodland and Mississippian peoples, and later Muscogee (Creeks) and Cherokees, lived here long before, and the great earthworks of the Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site survive along the Etowah River. In the antebellum decades the county was the center of an iron-making belt, with Cooper's Furnace among the chief producers. The Western and Atlantic Railroad made the county a Civil War corridor: the 1862 Andrews Raid passed through, the Battle of Allatoona Pass was fought here in 1864, and in 1865 the last remnant of the Confederate army east of the Mississippi was paroled at Kingston. Cotton dominated farming into the 1970s. Other landmarks include the Euharlee Covered Bridge and the first outdoor Coca-Cola wall sign, painted in Cartersville in 1894.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.org