Historic Sites in Greene County

The history of Greene County

Greene County was created on February 3, 1786, from the western part of Washington County on land the Muscogee (Creek) had controlled, and was named for General Nathanael Greene, the Revolutionary War commander who died that year. Its seat, Greensboro, was laid out near Richland Creek, and in 1787 a Muscogee attack burned homes and killed residents there as conflict over white settlement intensified. The town was incorporated in 1803. Cotton grown by enslaved people drove the antebellum economy, and by 1810 enslaved people made up about half of the county's roughly 12,000 residents. The Georgia Railroad reached Greensboro in 1838. The village of Penfield was the first home of Mercer University, founded in 1833 and moved to Macon in 1871, while the mill community of Scull Shoals rose and then succumbed to fire, flood and war; mounds built there by Native people date to about 1250–1500. After the Civil War, worn-out soil and wartime losses pushed the county from plantations toward small farms, and the boll weevil ended the cotton boom in the 1920s. Greensboro's 1849 courthouse still stands, and behind it is the granite jail built around 1807, whose upper floor contains a trap door once used for hangings. Lake Oconee, built by Georgia Power in 1979, is now a major feature of the county.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com