Historic Sites in Whitfield County

The history of Whitfield County

Whitfield County was formed from Murray County in 1851 and honors George Whitefield, the English minister who visited colonial Georgia in 1738 and founded the Bethesda orphan house near Savannah in 1740; legislators dropped the first e so the spelling would match the pronunciation. This was Cherokee country, where Charles Hicks kept a home northwest of present-day Dalton and served for thirty years as Cherokee interpreter to the U.S. government before his death in 1827. The Cherokee were forcibly removed in 1838 on the Trail of Tears. The arrival of the Western and Atlantic Railroad spurred the county's creation. At Tunnel Hill, crews cut a tunnel over 1,400 feet long through Chetoogeta Mountain, completed in 1850 as the first railroad tunnel south of the Mason-Dixon line, and it later figured in the Great Locomotive Chase. Dalton, the county seat, was named by New York merchant Edward White. During the Civil War, Confederate forces under General Joseph E. Johnston camped in the area through the winter of 1863-64 before Sherman's 1864 campaign drove them south. Prater's Mill, built in 1855, offered milling, wool carding, cotton ginning, a store and a blacksmith shop. Crown Cotton Mill opened in 1884, and Catherine Evans Whitener's hand-tufted bedspreads grew into a mechanized carpet industry that made Dalton known as the Carpet Capital of the World.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com