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Harris County, Georgia

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Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox U.S. county Harris County is a county located in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia; its western border with the state of Alabama is formed by the Chattahoochee River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 34,668.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The county seat is Hamilton.<ref name="GR6">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The largest city in the county is Pine Mountain, a resort town that is home to the Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park (the largest state park in Georgia). Harris County was created on December 14, 1827, and named for Charles Harris, a Georgia judge and attorney.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Harris County is part of the Columbus, GA-AL metropolitan area and has become a popular suburban and exurban destination of residence for families relocating from Columbus. Because of this, Harris has become the sixth-wealthiest county in Georgia in terms of per capita income and the third-wealthiest in the state outside of Metro Atlanta.

HistoryEdit

The county was settled by European Americans largely after the federal government had removed the indigenous Creek people (Muscogee) in the 1830s, under treaties by which they ceded most of their homelands to the United States. They were relocated to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

In the antebellum era, parts of the county were developed for cotton plantations, the premier commodity crop. Planters acquired numerous enslaved African Americans as laborers from the Upper South through the domestic slave trade.

The County Courthouse was designed by Edward Columbus Hosford of Georgia and completed in 1906.

Moonshiners were active in the mountain areas of the county in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both whites and blacks took part in this, and were common drinking patrons.<ref name="branan"/>

LynchingsEdit

On January 22, 1912, a black woman and three black men were lynched in Hamilton, the county seat, for the alleged murder of young local white landowner Norman Hadley. He was described by journalist Karen Branan in her 2016 book about these events as a white, "near penniless plowboy-playboy"<ref name="ajc">Jeff Calder, " 'Family Tree’ unpacks mystery of a 1912 Georgia lynching", Books & Literature, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 9, 2016, accessed April 6, 2016.</ref> and "notorious predator of black women."<ref>Karen Branan, "Getting to the Roots of My Family Tree", Coming to the Table, 2014, accessed April 6, 2016.</ref>

Of this group, Dusky Crutchfield was the first woman lynched in Georgia.<ref name="ajc"/> The lynching case attracted attention of national northern newspapers.<ref>"Woman and 3 Men Lynched by Mob", Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1912, accessed April 6, 2016.</ref><ref>(Associated Press), "Three Colored Men and Woman Lynched", VALLEY SENTINEL (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), January 26, 1912, accessed April 6, 2016.</ref> Also murdered by the lynch mob were Eugene Harrington, Burrell Hardaway,<ref name="lynchings">"Burrell Hardaway" Template:Webarchive, Georgia Lynching Project Circa 1875-1930, Project of Emory University, 2016, accessed April 6, 2016.</ref> and Johnie Moore. (Note: There was confusion about the names of victims at the time, and variations in spelling have been published.)<ref name="branan"/>

The four had been taken in for questioning about Hadley's murder by Sheriff Marion Madison "Buddie" Hadley, but never arrested. Lynched as scapegoats by a white mob of 100 men, they were later shown to have been utterly innocent. As an example of the complex relationships in the town and county, Johnie Moore was a mixed-race cousin of the sheriff; and Norman Hadley was the sheriff's nephew.<ref name="ajc"/><ref name="branan">Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth, Atria Books, 2016.</ref><ref name="lynchings"/>

In 1947, prosperous farmer Henry "Peg" Gilbert, a married African-American man who owned and farmed 100 acres in Troup County, was arrested by officials from neighboring Harris County and charged with harboring a fugitive. The 47-year-old father was accused in the case of Gus Davidson, an African-American man accused of fatally shooting a white man in Harris County and who had disappeared. Four days later Gilbert was dead, shot while held in jail by the Harris County Sheriff, who said it was self-defense. No charges were filed against him.

In 2016 the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project of Northeastern University reported on Gilbert's death in custody. They had found that Henry Gilbert had been beaten severely before his death, and shot five times. They asserted he had been detained and killed because whites resented his success as a farmer.<ref name="CRRJ_Georgia_1947">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="CRRJ_report_2016_Gilbert">Template:Cite report</ref> Economic issues and competition were often at the bottom of lynchings. A white man took over Gilbert's land, cheating his family out of everything he had built.

GeographyEdit

File:Harris county view 2.JPG
View of Harris County on Pine Mountain

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of Template:Convert, of which Template:Convert are land and Template:Convert (1.9%) are covered by water.<ref name="GR1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The county is located in the Piedmont region of the state, with forests, farmland, and rolling hills covering much of the county. The Pine Mountain Range begins in the county, and runs across the northernmost parts of the county, with the highest point on the range found at Dowdell's Knob near the Meriwether County line.

The majority of Harris County is located in the middle Chattahoochee River–Lake Harding subbasin of the ACF River Basin (Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint River Basin), with the exception of the county's southeastern border area, south of Ellerslie, which is located in the middle Chattahoochee River–Walter F. George Lake subbasin of the same ACF River Basin as that part of the county is drained by Bull Creek, which flows into Upatoi Creek south of Columbus.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lake Harding and Goat Rock Lake both form much of the county's western border along the Chattahoochee, and both are very popular recreational destinations, especially for metro Columbus residents.

Major highwaysEdit

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Adjacent countiesEdit

CommunitiesEdit

CitiesEdit

TownsEdit

Census-designated placesEdit

Unincorporated communitiesEdit

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DemographicsEdit

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Race Num. Perc.
White (non-Hispanic) 25,925 74.78%
Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 5,170 14.91%
Native American 101 0.29%
Asian 388 1.12%
Pacific Islander 21 0.06%
Other/Mixed 1,646 4.75%
Hispanic or Latino 1,417 4.09%

As of the 2020 United States census, there were 34,668 people, 12,156 households, and 9,581 families residing in the county.

PoliticsEdit

Like all of Georgia except the Unionist Fannin, Towns, Pickens and Gilmer counties, which were in the upland region and could not support plantations, Harris County was historically dominated by a majority of conservative white voters after the Civil War. They belonged to the Democratic Party. From the end of Reconstruction to 1980, they supported Republican presidential candidates only twice, in 1964 (when Barry Goldwater carried the state in a landslide) and 1972 (during Richard Nixon's national landslide).

But the passage of civil rights legislation by the national Democratic Party and social and cultural disruption of the era resulted in white conservatives beginning to support the Republican Party. In 1984, the state swung from having given a 16.8 percent victory to the 'favorite son' of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, in 1976, to a nearly 20-point victory for Ronald Reagan in his second term. In this, it was part of the realignment of white conservatives across the South. Since then, these voters in Harris County have voted for Republican presidential candidates. 1984 is the last time that a Democrat gained more than 40 percent of the vote. This trend has been attributed to the effect of Columbus's suburbs extending into the county, but it is part of the broader realignment among conservatives in the region.

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EducationEdit

The Harris County School District holds preschool to grade 12 and consists of four elementary schools, an intermediate school, a middle school, and a high school.<ref>Georgia Board of EducationTemplate:Dead link, Retrieved June 19, 2010.</ref> The district headquarters is located in Hamilton, and has 274 full-time teachers and over 4,411 students spread out over seven schools.<ref>School Stats, Retrieved June 19, 2010.</ref>

Notable peopleEdit

See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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