Historic Sites in Twiggs County

The history of Twiggs County

Twiggs County was created by an act of December 14, 1809, from part of Wilkinson County, in territory Georgia had acquired from the Muscogee (Creek) through the 1802 Treaty of Fort Wilkinson. It honors John Twiggs (1750-1816), a Maryland-born Revolutionary War leader from Burke County who later signed treaties with the Creeks at Galphinton and Shoulderbone in the 1780s. Long before statehood, Mississippian-era peoples and then Muscogee towns occupied the trading routes and waterways of this fall-line country. The first county seat was Marion, incorporated in 1816 and named for Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War's Swamp Fox. Marion thrived as an antebellum trading town, but its historical marker records that residents rejected the Central Railroad's planned route through town, and in 1868 the seat moved about six miles to Jeffersonville, leaving Marion to decline. A 1948 federal geodetic survey placed the exact center of Georgia in the Marion vicinity. Upland cotton sustained the antebellum economy, while railroads, forestry and kaolin mining shaped the decades after the Civil War. Richland Baptist Church, constituted near Jeffersonville on October 5, 1811, is a lasting landmark: its women made a flag for the Twiggs Guard in 1861, and a restoration league has cared for the old church since 1928.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orghmdb.orggeorgiahistory.com