Courthouse

Meriwether County Courthouse (Courthouse)

Greenville · Meriwether County

The stone-and-brick heart of every Georgia county.

The Story

The Meriwether County Courthouse in Greenville was completed in 1903 to designs by prolific Atlanta courthouse architect J. W. Golucke, replacing an 1832 brick predecessor that a tornado had damaged in 1893. Built of red brick with limestone Corinthian columns and crowned by an octagonal dome bearing a figure of Justice, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 7, 1973, and was restored within its surviving walls after a 1976 fire gutted much of the interior. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented five racial-terror lynchings of Black people in Meriwether County between 1877 and 1950, part of the county's difficult Reconstruction- and Jim Crow-era history. The county was also the setting of the 1948 murder of Black sharecropper Wilson Turner by white Meriwether landowner John Wallace, whose body was left within the county, though Wallace's celebrated trial, later dramatized as Murder in Coweta County, was held not in the Greenville courthouse but across the line in the Coweta County courthouse in Newnan. Greenville's square courthouse remains the center of county government.

About this site

Meriwether County Courthouse is a courthouse in Greenville, Meriwether County. It is one of 132 historic sites cataloged in Meriwether County on Georgia Roam.

The site sits at 33.0287, -84.7132 near Greenville. The nearest cataloged historic site is Brigadier General David Meriwether (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Noted Indian Trail, Meriwether County, and Meriwether County Courthouse.

This record is drawn from the USGS Geographic Names Information System. Use the map below for its exact position and turn-by-turn directions.

Meriwether County Courthouse
Photo: Calvin Beale, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
History

The Meriwether County Courthouse in Greenville was completed in 1903 to designs by prolific Atlanta courthouse architect J. W. Golucke, replacing an 1832 brick predecessor that a tornado had damaged in 1893. Built of red brick with limestone Corinthian columns and crowned by an octagonal dome bearing a figure of Justice, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 7, 1973, and was restored within its surviving walls after a 1976 fire gutted much of the interior. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented five racial-terror lynchings of Black people in Meriwether County between 1877 and 1950, part of the county's difficult Reconstruction- and Jim Crow-era history. The county was also the setting of the 1948 murder of Black sharecropper Wilson Turner by white Meriwether landowner John Wallace, whose body was left within the county, though Wallace's celebrated trial, later dramatized as Murder in Coweta County, was held not in the Greenville courthouse but across the line in the Coweta County courthouse in Newnan. Greenville's square courthouse remains the center of county government.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgeji.orgen.wikipedia.org

Also at or near Greenville, Meriwether County

“Meriwether County Courthouse” names 2 distinct records in Meriwether County. This page is the courthouse in Greenville. The others:

📍 33.0287, -84.7132 · Greenville, Meriwether County
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