Elbert County

By Joyce M. Davis

Established in 1790, Elbert County was carved from adjacent Wilkes County and named in honor of American patriot and former governor Samuel Elbert. Located in Northeast Georgia on the Savannah and Broad Rivers, the territory witnessed Revolutionary War fighting and the creation of Fort James, Dartmouth, and Petersburg, occurring all before 1790. Later Ruckersville, Heardmont, Bowman, and Dewy Rose were established. Elberton, chosen as county seat by former governor Stephen Heard's committee, was incorporated in 1803 and dominated county history thereafter. Nancy Hart and Stephen Heard, among others, aided the revolution; merchants William and Beverly Allen forged a business path; and preachers, including Dozier Thornton, established many county churches. In later years, Corra Harris, born at Farmhill, attended Elberton Female Academy before becoming a noted writer. In the 20th century, cotton production was overshadowed by the growth of granite quarrying and finishing, leading to Elberton becoming the "Granite Capital of the World."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439626665

Joyce M. Davis

Joyce M. Davis is Associate Director of Broadcasting for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and supervises American broadcast services to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia and is the author of Between Jihad and Salaam: Profiles in Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

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INTRODUCTION

Elbert County is located in northeast Georgia and is bordered on the east by the Savannah River and on the south and west by the Broad River. It is surrounded by Lincoln, Wilkes, and Oglethorpe Counties to the south, Madison and Franklin Counties to the west, and Hart County to the north. After the settlement of Georgia in 1733, sections of the large area of the state that became Elbert County were settled by the mid- to late 18th century; but the formal beginning of Elbert County occurred in 1790, when a sizable portion of territory in northeastern Georgia was separated from the large county of Wilkes and turned into a new county named in honor of Samuel Elbert (1740–1788), Mason, merchant, son of a Baptist minister, hero of the American Revolution, and governor of Georgia from 1785 to 1786, when the University of Georgia was chartered (1785). At the time, the state honored each new county by bestowing upon it the name of a recently deceased important Georgian. In this case, former governor Samuel Elbert had died two years earlier.

Much of the early history of the territory that became Elbert County was tied to the presence of the Savannah and Broad Rivers, which frame the area on the east, south and west and meet in the southeastern part of the county, at what was known then as the Point. There, Gov. James Wright built Fort James, where settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina entered Georgia and registered as new residents. In the early years, food gathering was critical to survival, and fishing on the rivers provided one source of food. Trapping and hunting were also activities essential to putting meals on early settlers’ tables. Later as the patriotic movement in the 13 colonies heated up and expanded into resistance to British control, the rivers continued to play a vital role in the lives of the settlers by providing both opportunities and obstacles to heroic action, as the river crossings figured in a number of key battles. A number of decisive victories for the American cause both began and ended in the area that would become Elbert County or took place near its borders. Dominating the list of heroic leaders of the American Revolution in the land that became Elbert County were Nancy Hart, a pioneer woman who spied on and killed British soldiers for the American cause; Stephen Heard, a future Georgia governor who figured in major battles; Barnard Heard, brother of Stephen Heard; and Dan Tucker, on whose life a famous folk tune was reputedly based.

Following the Revolution and the establishment of Elbert County, towns began to be formed. Dartmouth was an early fortified establishment at Fort James and soon yielded to Petersburg, which began as a tobacco warehouse and evolved into one of the most important cities in the state as its prosperity expanded almost exponentially with the construction of tobacco warehouses. With the waning of the tobacco industry and the introduction of cotton farming, as well as the attendant problems of poor means of shipping cotton by land from Petersburg, other towns in Elbert County began to eclipse Petersburg in importance. These included Ruckersville, which was named after Ruckersville, Virginia, and Heardmont, a settlement named after the large manor house of Stephen Heard, a hero of the American Revolution and Georgia governor in 1780–1781. The small towns of Middleton, Dewy Rose, and Bowman were established at about the same time. Most important of all these towns, however, was Elberton, the county seat. The name Elberton came to be used for the town after Elbertville and others had been tried, and the city of Elberton was incorporated in 1803. The first session of Elbert County court was held soon after the creation of the county in a makeshift courthouse on the plantation of Revolutionary Thomas A. Carter. Despite the informality of the venue, however, these court actions held in the private home bore the same authority and resonance as decisions made in the formal courthouses that would follow. Soon after the first court session, an early courthouse was constructed, and in the early 19th century, a second courthouse was built in the middle of what is now named Sutton Square, the central public square in the city. In the early 1890s, following a well-orchestrated public appeal to the citizens of Elbert County through a series of newspaper articles, the county chose to build a new courthouse. This third and present courthouse was designed by native architect Reuben Harrison Hunt, and after a number of repairs, both major and minor, remains in use for the citizens of Elbert County.

Cotton became a dominant crop in Elbert County during the late 19th century, primarily as a result of development of the cotton gin and improvements in the means of bringing a viable cotton product to market; and it led to the growth of the cotton industry, which required warehouses for storage and sale, buyers for the cotton crop, and the means to deliver the product to the buyers and ultimately to larger markets outside the county and state. The development of the railroad industry and the introduction of rail lines into Elbert County, in 1878, with the construction of the Elberton Air Line Railroad that ran from Elberton to Toccoa, Georgia, provided the small towns of the county access to large cities and faraway destinations. Travel into and out of Elbert County up to that time had been by stagecoach, on the old post road from Elberton to Lexington, Georgia, now indicated by a Georgia Historical Society marker. Trains provided a means to take Elbertonians to distant places and to bring passengers to Elberton for shopping in the growing mercantile district. They also served for commercial transport, as much of the cotton grown in Elbert County went to large markets elsewhere on trains.

A third major industry arose in the late 19th century in Elbert County and grew to dominate all other industries in the town and the entire county. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the presence of an especially pure strain of blue granite was found in large veins beneath the soil in the county. As quarrying for the granite