Historic Sites in Wilkes County

The history of Wilkes County

Wilkes County dates to 1777, when it was organized from the Ceded Lands, the territory between the Broad and Savannah rivers that the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) ceded under a 1773 treaty. It was named for John Wilkes, the member of the British Parliament who opposed the policies driving the colonies toward revolution. The county seat, Washington, grew around a fort that Stephen Heard, later a Georgia governor, built in 1773, and it is reputed to be the first town in the United States named for George Washington. On February 14, 1779, Patriot militia won a decisive victory over Loyalist forces at Kettle Creek, checking British efforts to push into the backcountry; the battlefield is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wilkes County is credited with the first cotton mill in the South. In the spring of 1865 the Confederate treasury passed through Washington, and in May Jefferson Davis held the last meeting of his cabinet in the town's bank building, a site now occupied by the 1904 courthouse. Robert Toombs, U.S. senator and Confederate secretary of state, lived in a Washington house that is now a state historic site. The boll weevil devastated the cotton economy in the 1920s, and the county's population fell sharply in the decades that followed.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.org