Historic Sites in Mcduffie County

The history of Mcduffie County

McDuffie County was created late in 1870 from parts of Warren and Columbia counties and named for George McDuffie, a Georgia native who became a lawyer, governor, and U.S. senator in South Carolina. Its county seat, Thomson, had been incorporated in 1854 as a Georgia Railroad town and was named for J. Edgar Thomson, the railroad's chief engineer and surveyor. The area's colonial history runs much deeper. In 1767 Royal Governor James Wright granted 12,000 acres to Quakers from Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and the township of Wrightsborough, formally established in 1770, was intended as a buffer between Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee lands and the settlements of St. Paul Parish. The Revolutionary War put heavy pressure on the pacifist community, and by 1800 most of its original families had moved to the Midwest. The Rock House, built in 1785 and believed to be Georgia's oldest surviving stone house, and the 1810 Wrightsboro church remain from that era. Cotton dominated the nineteenth-century economy, and by 1880 African Americans made up 64 percent of the county's 9,449 residents. Gold was also found along the Little River in the early 1800s. Thomson was home to Populist leader and U.S. senator Thomas E. Watson, whose house, Hickory Hill, is a National Historic Landmark, and it was the birthplace of blues musician Blind Willie McTell.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.org