Historic Sites in Putnam County

The history of Putnam County

Putnam County was created in 1807 from Baldwin County and named for General Israel Putnam, a Revolutionary War officer who fought at Breed's (Bunker) Hill. Eatonton, named for soldier and diplomat William Eaton, became the county seat in 1808 and was incorporated the following year. Centuries earlier, Native Americans built Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk, bird-shaped effigy mounds made of stone that are more than a thousand years old. In the antebellum era cotton ruled the economy, and enslaved people already made up more than 30 percent of the county's residents by 1810. A railroad spur linked Eatonton to Milledgeville in 1854. Although Putnam voted against secession in 1861, General William T. Sherman's troops destroyed cotton gins, rail lines and bridges in the county in 1864. Recovery came partly through dairying and by 1901 Putnam ranked third among Georgia's dairy counties. Two of the South's best-known writers were born in Eatonton. Joel Chandler Harris, born in 1845, began his career at the Countryman newspaper on nearby Turnwold Plantation, where he gathered the African American folktales he later retold in the Uncle Remus stories; the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton recalls his work. Alice Walker, born to a sharecropping family in 1944, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.org