By Dr. Charles Pendley
Contributing writer

The following is the story of Henry County’s past, present and possible future, told in the words of one of its lifelong residents.

This year, 2021, is our county’s Bicentennial year, marking 200 years since our County’s founding by an act of the state legislature on May 15, 1821. It is altogether fitting to look back on the last two centuries, on the people and events that made Henry County what it is today and – hopefully – to draw some lessons from our county’s history.

Our county’s history can be told as a story of five chapters. First was a series of (controversial) treaties with the Creek Indian Nation in the 1820s and the rapid settlement by pioneers of mainly English and Scottish descent; secondly, the arrival of railroads and “King Cotton,” which encouraged plantation agriculture, the use of slave labor; thirdly, the bloody experience of the Civil War, reconstruction and the aftermath; fourthly, King Cotton’s reign continued with former slaves now sharecroppers or tenant farmers and the emergence of a textile industry, and fifthly, the decline of the family farm, hastened by spillover of newcomers from Atlanta’s prosperity and other states, the coming of the Interstate, blossoming “subdivisions” and diversity of the county’s economy and population.

Before 1821, land that was soon to become Henry County was covered by seemingly endless pine and hardwood forests crisscrossed by creeks, rolling hills and Indian trails and villages. White traders and small farmers had already started settling there, trading in furs and deerskins, hunting the plentiful wild game and clearing forest to cultivate small plots of corn and other crops.

That was soon to change. The frontier of Georgia was on the move westward. In 1821, Georgia’s capital was Milledgeville on the Ocmulgee River, which was then the far western boundary of the state.

The scene was set for the next acts that led to the birth of our county. US government commissioners, in league with the governors of Georgia and fueled by a policy of westward expansion called “manifest destiny,” negotiated a series of controversial treaties with representatives of the Cherokee and Creek Indian nations.

The talks, called by the governor and representatives of Georgia that were to become the First Treaty of Indian Springs, began in December 1820 with a Lower Creek headman called William McIntosh, who led a group of Creek Indians. “William McIntosh” – not a typical Creek Indian name – was the son of a Scottish father and a Creek mother. McIntosh owned an inn and tavern at Indian Springs, where the First Treaty of Indian Springs was signed on January 8, 1821. The Treaty ceded some 4.3 million acres of land extending from Alpharetta in the north southward between the Flint and Ocmulgee Rivers almost to present day Albany. In return, the US government agreed to pay the Creeks some $200,000 (less than 5 cents an acre) over 14 years, including a first installment of $50,000. The US Government also paid McIntosh $40,000 directly and granted him 1,000 acres of land at Indian Springs, where McIntosh built a hotel – now the Indian Springs Hotel Museum.

The terms of these “negotiations” and “treaties,” as could be expected, were not accepted by all groups of Creeks. Chief William McIntosh and members of his family paid for these treaties with their lives, being assassinated by a group of Creeks that saw him as a traitor who sold out his own tribe, eventually condemning the Creek Nation to oblivion.
1821 was a very busy year. No sooner than the ink had dried on the First Treaty of Indian Springs, surveyors were dispatched to lay out the boundaries of new counties, districts and 202 1/2 acre land lots.

In 1821 Henry County was much larger than it is today. It has been called “The Mother of Counties,” because it once included parts or all of present-day Spalding, DeKalb, Fulton, Newton, Butts, Rockdale, Fayette and Clayton counties.
To encourage rapid settlement of the newly acquired land, the state General Assembly authorized land lotteries in 1803. Land in Henry County was distributed in the land lottery of 1821.

Many of the early settlers came from Morgan, Walton, Putman, Jasper, Greene, and other nearby counties. The main road – if you can call it that – entering the new county was where two Indian trails met on the Ocmulgee River, known as Key’s Ferry. The early settlers grew mainly corn and tobacco; cotton was yet to become important due to the difficulty of removing the seeds from the lint. The cotton gin would soon change that.

On December 24, 1821, an Act was passed by the state legislature which provided for the election of five justices of an inferior court whose task it was to lay out militia districts and set up the election of officers for the new county. Two years later, in December 1823, the county seat was incorporated and named for the hero of the recent War of 1812, Commodore Thomas McDonough, who had defeated the British navy on Lake Champlain.

By 1830 the population of Henry County had grown to 10,566, in 1840, 11,756, and by 1850 it was 14,726. In 1830, the population of the town of McDonough itself was probably not more than a few hundred people.

The stage was now set for the next epoch in our county’s history – the reign of “King Cotton,” the coming of railroads with their “Iron Horses,” the plantation system, slave labor, and the destruction and devastation of the Civil War.