Historic Sites in Dodge County

The history of Dodge County

Dodge County was created in 1870 from parts of Montgomery, Pulaski, and Telfair counties, with some territory returned to Telfair in 1872 and 1875. It is named for William Earle Dodge, a New York businessman who cofounded one of the world's largest mining and metals companies. The Muscogee (Creek) had ceded the land in the treaties of Fort Wilkinson in 1802 and Washington in 1805, and white settlement began in the 1840s. The county seat, Eastman, grew from a railroad station established in 1869, took its name from industrialist William Pitt Eastman, and was incorporated as a town in 1871. Its early decades were marked by bitter conflict over land. In 1868 the Georgia Land and Lumber Company acquired more than 300,000 acres for less than ten cents an acre, and when cutting began in the 1870s, farmers who had worked the land were evicted, touching off years of lawsuits, imprisonments, and killings arranged by the company. The original landowners did not regain the property until 1923, when it was nearly stripped bare. Cotton farming later collapsed under the boll weevil and the Great Depression, and growers shifted to peanuts, pecans, watermelons, and livestock. In the mid-1930s Williamson Stuckey started a pecan candy business here. The neoclassical revival courthouse in Eastman was built in 1908.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.org