Historic Sites in Towns County

The history of Towns County

Towns County was created in 1856 from parts of Rabun and Union counties and named for George W. Towns, governor of Georgia from 1847 to 1851. Lying in the Blue Ridge Mountains along the North Carolina line, the area was Cherokee country, and white settlers moved in after the Cherokee land cessions of 1818 and 1819. A Cherokee trading path through Unicoi Gap became one of the region's first important routes. When the Cherokee were forced out of Georgia, one of the removal forts used to hold them stood at the site of Hiawassee, now the county seat. The county's isolation spared it from major Civil War campaigns, but some residents who opposed the Confederacy were ambushed and killed while trying to flee to Tennessee. Gold and other minerals were mined in the eastern part of the county. In 1886 Methodist minister Artemus Lester founded a school named for its benefactor, Judge Young L. G. Harris, and in 1895 the surrounding community renamed itself Young Harris in honor of the college. After World War I, new roads built for automobiles shifted the economy from farming to tourism, a trend reinforced when the Tennessee Valley Authority created Lake Chatuge in the early 1940s. Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest mountain, rises nearby, and Governor Zell Miller is among the county's best-known sons.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.org