Historic Sites in Bleckley County

The history of Bleckley County

Bleckley County was carved from Pulaski County in 1912, following a legislative act that July and a constitutional amendment that October, becoming Georgia's 147th county. It is named for Logan E. Bleckley, a Rabun County native who served on the Supreme Court of Georgia as an associate justice from 1875 to 1880 and as chief justice from 1887 to 1894, and who is remembered as one of the state's great jurists. The county seat is Cochran, which was incorporated in 1869 under the name Dykesboro and later renamed for Judge Arthur E. Cochran, president of the Macon and Brunswick Railroad. Early accounts of the area describe extensive pine forests, and the county developed as an agricultural community producing cotton, soybeans and peanuts along with peaches, pecans and livestock. Natural disasters left their mark as well: a 1929 tornado killed six people, and another in 1958 injured sixteen. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration funded improvements to local schools. The neoclassical revival Bleckley County Courthouse, completed in 1914, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, as was Hillcrest, an early twentieth-century Classical Revival home. Cochran was also long home to Middle Georgia College, a two-year college in the University System of Georgia that merged into what is now Middle Georgia State University in 2013.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com