![]() Cotton was selling at twelve to sixteen cents a pound, and 69,000 bags of cotton were poled down the Ocmulgee River to Darien there were three new banks with capital of $1 million, and merchandise in stores was estimated at like value. Farmland in the surrounding countryside, distributed by lottery, was also quickly taken: ten years later the city boasted more than 3,000 “industrious and enterprising” inhabitants who had flocked to the area from New England, New York, and North Carolina Bibb County had more than twice that number. Building began immediately, and the town was incorporated on December 8, 1823. With dozens of families already living around Fort Benjamin Hawkins, the 1806 frontier outpost on the east bank that had served as post office, trading “factory,” and military supplies distribution point for more than a decade, there was no shortage of bidders when the lots were put up for auction. Shortly thereafter the state legislature began carving the new land into counties and authorized the laying out of a town on the Ocmulgee’s west bank.įort Benjamin Hawkins Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library. ![]() In 1821, demoralized by their defeat at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Creek Indians finally relinquished the area between the Ocmulgee and Flint rivers, as well as the Ocmulgee Old Fields, which had been withheld from the 1805 cession. Land-hungry Americans were eager to plow it into cotton fields. The land that became Macon/Bibb County was Indian Territory until 1821, nearly as pristine and undeveloped as Hernando de Soto found it when he rode through in 1540. ![]() Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins (sixteen miles south of Macon), the largest industrial complex in the state, drives the region’s ongoing growth. Not until the infusion of people and monies that began with military preparations for World War II (1941-45) was the stage set for a stronger, more diversified economy. Macon Streetscape Courtesy of Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Community Affairs.Īs the commercial hub of a productive agricultural region, the city’s fortunes were tied to a southern cotton culture that brought substantial wealth, war, and subsequently genteel poverty for its first 100-plus years. ![]()
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