Historic Sites in Bibb County

The history of Bibb County

Bibb County was created on December 9, 1822, from parts of Houston, Jones, Monroe and Twiggs counties, on land the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had ceded in 1821. It is named for William Wyatt Bibb, a Georgia politician who became the first elected governor of Alabama. Macon, incorporated in 1823 and named for North Carolina statesman Nathaniel Macon, is the county seat; city and county governments consolidated in 2014. The site sits on the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, where people lived for thousands of years. More than a thousand years ago, Mississippian people built the Great Temple Mound and other earthworks now protected at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, ancestral homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In 1806 the United States built Fort Hawkins as a frontier trading post nearby. Cotton poled downriver to Darien and later a growing rail network made Macon a commercial hub, and during the Civil War it served as a Confederate manufacturing, hospital and depository center, briefly hosting the state government in 1864 and 1865. Camp Wheeler and nearby Robins Air Force Base shaped the twentieth-century economy. Wesleyan College, founded in 1836, and Mercer University are here, and the city is linked to poet Sidney Lanier and musicians Little Richard and Otis Redding.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.org