Historic Sites in Douglas County

The history of Douglas County

Douglas County was created on October 17, 1870, from parts of Campbell and Carroll counties and named for Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois Democrat who lost the 1860 presidential race to Abraham Lincoln. Selecting a county seat took four years of dispute that reached the Georgia Supreme Court, and Douglasville was established in 1875 at a place once called Skint Chestnut, after a tree that had served as a Native marker. Mississippian-period mounds and artifacts point to a long Indigenous presence, and later the boundary between Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee lands ran just east of present-day Douglasville until both nations were forced out, with Cherokee removal completed along the Trail of Tears in 1838. Before the county existed, the mill town of New Manchester grew up around a textile factory on Sweetwater Creek. On July 9, 1864, Union troops burned the factory and the entire town, and the mill ruins now lie within Sweetwater Creek State Park, a tract of more than 2,000 acres acquired in the late 1960s. After the war, the Georgia Western Railroad was built through the county between 1881 and 1883 on a line from Atlanta toward Birmingham. Lithia Springs, prized for its mineral waters, drew wealthy visitors to a resort hotel until fire destroyed it in 1912.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.org