Historic Sites in Gordon County

The history of Gordon County

Gordon County was created in 1850 from parts of Cass (now Bartow) and Floyd counties and named for William Washington Gordon, a state senator and the first president of the Central of Georgia Railroad. Calhoun, named for South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, became the county seat the same year. A generation earlier this ground was at the center of the Cherokee Nation. In 1825 the Cherokee legislature made the town of New Town its capital and renamed it New Echota. There the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in English and Cherokee, became the first newspaper published in a Native American language, and there the treaty was signed surrendering Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi, which led to the forced removal of 1838–39 known as the Trail of Tears. New Echota State Historic Site preserves the story with reconstructed buildings. During the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Union and Confederate armies fought the Battle of Resaca in the northern part of the county, and William T. Sherman used Calhoun as a headquarters; a Confederate cemetery honors soldiers who died in the fighting. After the war farmers raised wheat, corn, oats and cotton, and in the twentieth century cotton mills gave way to carpet and textile manufacturing. Calhoun's Harris Arts Center houses a museum honoring the celebrated tenor Roland Hayes.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.comen.wikipedia.org