Historic Sites in Talbot County

The history of Talbot County

Talbot County was created in 1827 from Muscogee County and named for Matthew Talbot, who briefly served as Georgia's governor in 1819. Talbotton is the county seat. The last Muscogee (Creek) people in the area were forcibly removed in 1836, and the county's population climbed quickly afterward. By 1850 Talbot was the fifth largest county in Georgia, with 16,534 residents, about half of them enslaved, and its farms turned out some 18,800 bales of cotton a year along with peaches and livestock. Talbotton developed into a center of learning, home to Collinsworth Institute and the Talbotton Female Academy, later LeVert College, one of the state's early schools for women. In 1854 Lazarus Straus, an immigrant from Bavaria, brought his family to Talbotton and opened a store; his sons went on to national prominence, with Isidor building Macy's into a renowned department store, Oscar serving as a diplomat under four presidents and Nathan championing milk pasteurization. A historical marker identifies the family's home site. Zion Episcopal Church, a Carpenter Gothic building consecrated in 1853, survives largely unaltered and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Queen Anne-style courthouse dates to 1892. The boll weevil devastated cotton in the early 1920s, and by the 1990s livestock accounted for most of the county's farm income.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orghmdb.orgen.wikipedia.org