A Rich Heritage
The new Monroe County War Memorial on the courthouse square honors those who served or were killed fighting for their country.
The Georgia legislature created Monroe County in 1821 from a Creek Indian concession at Indian Springs. It is named for James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, whose famed Monroe Doctrine claimed American right to fend off European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. The county’ s rich, colorful past has reflected the history of the American South.
The Antebellum Years
In the antebellum period, settlers chiefly from older portions of Georgia moved into the raw but rich lands of the county, carving out for themselves farms and plantations. A significant number of them had or acquired slaves, so that the population of the county in 1860 was 5,753 free and 10,177 slave. Wealthy or not, these settlers built for themselves simple homes in the plantation plain style, some of which visitors can still see in Forsyth and in remote sections of the county.
After the creation of the county, the towns of Culloden and Forsyth were founded. Culloden achieved importance not only as a commercial center but also as an educational center with various schools, separately for males and females. The Southern botanist and educator, John Darby, who also patented Darby’ s Prophylactic Fluid, taught at one of these. Forsyth had, for a while, the original Southern Botanico Medical College and the Monroe Female College, which became Tift College
The Railroad
Perhaps the most significant development for the county in this period was the construction in 1838 of a railroad that first linked Forsyth to Macon. It was the first railroad in Georgia. Later the Macon and Western joined Forsyth to Atlanta. The rails provided an economical means of transporting cotton and of bringing goods into the town, both from Savannah to the south and Atlanta from the north.
aged the cultivation of cotton and encouraged the production of food stuffs.
As the Battle of Atlanta raged, thousands of wounded Confederates were shipped by train to Forsyth where locals scrambled to convert homes and even the Tift College campus into war hospitals.
Throughout the 1860s Civil War years, Monroe County served as the center for sick and wounded soldiers in the wake of General Sherman’ s legendary and destructive march through Georgia. Forsyth, with its central location, provided the most accessible hospital base for the nearly 20,000 injured soldiers following the epic battles in Atlanta, Stone Mountain and Jonesboro. Almost every conceivable shelter was used to house and treat the wounded: the courthouse, the Monroe Female College, the Hilliard Institute, the old Lumpkin Hotel, stores and even private
Civil War
With the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, the inhabitants of the county were engulfed in an unparalleled situation. Between 1861 and 1865, Monroe County men went off to war. The persons who remained faced a Confederate policy that discourficially ended; word had not yet reached area troops that Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9, 1865. The Battle of Culloden took place exactly 10 days after the surrender of the Confederacy.
Changing with the South
The Confederate defeat brought a new reality to the inhabitants of the county. Farmers no longer owned laborers. Male slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment gained citizenship and with the Fifteenth Amendment the right to vote. C. L. Clower, a former slave, represented the county in the state legislature. Economically there was a significant readjustment.
In time citizens of the county embraced the New South ideology that Henry Grady and his associate Joel Chandler Harris, a former resident of Forsyth, preached in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution. Business
Family members have bought pavers at the memorial on the courthouse square to remember those from Monroe County who served.
homes. Eventually, tent hospitals were set up to shelter the overwhelming number of suffering, injured soldiers.
Monroe County was spared much of the shattering physical violence of the Civil War, although a battle was fought in Culloden after the War had ofleaders began to build textile factories. The Heads and Newtons established Trio Manufacturing Company. The Ensigns established the Ensign Cotton Mills.
Agriculture with all of its problems continued to be the livelihood of many residents. By the 1930s, though, Southern
Welcome Home: The Forsyth-Monroe County Relocation Guide and Membership Directory
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