19th Century

It was built to look like the United States Capitol and is now a national historic landmark. Georgia’s capital moved from Milledgeville to Atlanta in 1868 but without any buildings to house it, so state government had two temporary quarters—the old Atlanta City Hall and the Kimball Opera House. In 1883, the state legislature authorized […]

It was Atlanta’s most popular newspaper for almost 100 years. The Atlanta Journal published its first edition in 1883 and the afternoon paper quickly challenged the Constitution, its more established morning rival. E.F. Hoge founded the Journal, then sold it in 1887 to a young lawyer named Hoke Smith for $10,000. President Grover Cleveland appointed […]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on this day in 1882, but perhaps no other president besides Jimmy Carter had such strong Georgia ties. Stricken with polio in 1921, Roosevelt made his first visit to Warm Springs three years later. It became his second home. He founded what is now the […]

The son of sharecroppers in Webster County became one of the longest serving U.S. senators in Georgia history. Walter F. George graduated from Mercer Law School and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. He supported early New Deal programs but broke with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his attempt to pack the Supreme […]

General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia, but his grave had been lost in England until it was found by the man who also re-founded Oglethorpe University. Thornwell Jacobs was born in South Carolina in 1877. His grandfather served on the faculty of the original Oglethorpe, founded in 1835 and out of business since […]

He was one of those classic character actors from the golden age of Hollywood but you probably didn’t know his name. Actor Charles Coburn was born in Macon in 1877 and grew up in Savannah. At age 19, after working in local theater, he headed off to Broadway. When his first wife died in 1937, […]

Her artwork hangs in distinguished company. Lucy May Stanton was born in Atlanta in 1875. She grew up across the street from the Wren’s Nest, Joel Chandler Harris’ home. Stanton majored in Greek and Latin at Southern Female College in LaGrange. Most of her formal art training came in Paris. Her work appeared in exhibitions […]

She was the first female architect in Georgia and the first woman in the South to receive formal architectural training. Henrietta Dozier was born in Fernandina, Florida, in 1872, and moved to Atlanta when she was 2 years old. Dozier studied Beaux-Arts classicism at the Pratt Institute in New York. At 27, she earned her […]

Before Margaret Mitchell, before Flannery O’Connor, Georgia produced a female author who was just as famous in her day. Corra Harris was born in Elbert County in 1869. Her writing career began out of economic necessity because of her minister husband’s alcoholism and depression. Harris wrote a letter to a New York magazine defending the […]

Long before “bloody Sunday” in Selma, Georgia had a much bloodier civil rights event – the Camilla Massacre. On this day in 1868, during Reconstruction, a political rally in Mitchell County resulted in about a dozen freedmen being killed and 30 other wounded. Georgia had just been readmitted to the Union, but blacks and whites […]