Travel Guide Eatonton

Founded in 1808 and named after the Revolutionary Officer William Eaton, Eatonton is the capital of Putnam County. After the war of independence, the settlers, then mainly based on the state coast, pushed westward to find land to exploit. At that time, the interior of Georgia was occupied by Creek tribes and a treaty was signed with them to make room for farmers. The Amerindians thus moved to the western end of the state and a lottery system made it possible to allocate free land. Cotton quickly became the predominant source of the economy and Eatonton, an admiring city. Originally, most of the inhabitants were settled in the countryside, including many farmers and a large population of slaves. Then, after the planters had made their fortune, they began to build houses in Eatonton, where churches sprang up like mushrooms, as did the magnificent buildings of the Greek Renaissance style. Eatonton was structured and became a dynamic centre until the Civil War, which changed the situation. Like the South in general, Eatonton was afflicted by the ravages of war, particularly when General Sherman's troops, after splitting south of Atlanta, found themselves there for a few days, destroying all agricultural and railway goods and equipment in their path. It took Eatonton many years to recover from this dark period and when cotton production finally resumed, the picture remained more or less the same: whites exploiting blacks under a sharecropping system not far from pre-war conditions. But the cotton economy is once again being damaged by the invasion of the cotton weevils. In the 1920s, Eatonton had to rebuild itself again and turned to another form of agriculture that made it, for a time, the "dairy capital of Georgia". Today, the construction of two natural lakes (Oconee and Sinclair) is a new form of economy based on energy and recreation. Pine nurseries are also a significant source of income. Made famous by the presence of a unique Amerindian site, Rock Eagle Mound, to be the birthplace of writer Joel Chandler Harris, and for its concentration of more than 100 Antebellum and Victorian homes, Eatonton is a pleasant destination 1.5 hours south-east of Atlanta.Good to know, there is a time difference of one hour between Columus and the part on the other side of the river, located in Alabama.