History of Macon County, Georgia

Macon County in central Georgia was formed from Houston and Marion counties in 1837, and was itself the parent county, in part, of Peach and Taylor counties. Mrs. Hays' "History of Macon County," which was authorized as the official history of the county by the county commissioners in 1933, is a goldmine of historical and genealogical information. Among the subjects covered by Mrs. Hays are: topography; the Native American population; early land grants and surveys; migrations into Macon County from Newberry and other places in South Carolina; political organization of the county itself; the founding of towns like Lanier, Oglethorpe, and Marshallville; the dispersion of religious denominations; the Civil War in Macon County and sketches of Macon County officers and units who served elsewhere in the Confederacy; the contemporary state of the professions, banks, and newspapers in Macon County; and profiles of distinguished citizens of the author's day. Interwoven in and around the narrative, however, is a vast amount of genealogical source material, such as lists of land lottery winners, county officials with dates of service, scores of Bible records and cemetery transcriptions, the Macon County tax list of 1838, marriage and will abstracts from 1858 to 1909, and detailed rosters of Macon County participants in the Civil War and World War I. Finally, fully one-fourth of the book is taken up with genealogies prepared by Macon County families.