Historic Sites in Peach County

The history of Peach County

Peach County was created by legislative act on July 18, 1924, from parts of Houston and Macon counties, and it was the last county Georgia established. It was named for the peach crop that had become one of the state's signature products, and Fort Valley, incorporated in 1856, is the county seat. In the early 1800s the Muscogee (Creek) hunted on these lands, which passed to the United States through treaties in 1821 and 1825. James A. Everett founded Fort Valley around 1825 as a trading post, and planters from South Carolina introduced cotton in 1832. Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fort Valley holds the graves of twenty unknown Civil War soldiers who died in a train wreck north of town. The region's peach industry was built on the Elberta variety introduced by Samuel H. Rumph in 1870 and named for his wife, and Peach Blossom Festivals drew thousands of visitors in the 1920s. Fort Valley State University, a historically Black institution whose roots reach to 1895, took its modern form in 1939 when a Fort Valley school merged with the State Teachers and Agricultural College, which had begun in Forsyth. The county is also home to the American Camellia Society's Massee Lane Gardens and to Blue Bird, the school bus manufacturer founded in 1927.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.comgeorgiaencyclopedia.org