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Official Website
Overview
The county was settled by European Americans largely after the federal government had forcibly removed the indigenous Creek people (Muscogee), who 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 imported numerous slaves as workers from the Upper South through the domestic slave trade.
By the late 19th century, there were 200 years of families, black, white and mixed-race, with many interconnections among them; justice and injustice was nearly always meted out to kin. Moonshiners were active in the mountain areas of the county in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
On January 22, 1912, a black woman and three black men were lynched in Hamilton, the county seat, allegedly for the 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" and "notorious predator of black women."
Of this group, Dusky Crutchfield was the first woman lynched in Georgia, and the lynching case attracted attention of national northern newspapers. Also murdered by the lynch mob were Eugene Harrington, Burrell Hardaway, and Johnie Moore. Note: There was confusion about the names of victims at the time, and variations in spelling have been published.
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 innocent. As an example of the complex relationships in the town and county, Johnie Moore was a mixed-race cousin of the sheriff; Norman Hadley was the sheriff's nephew.
Adjacent Counties
- Chambers County, Alabama
- Lee County, Alabama
- Meriwether County
- Muscogee County
- Talbot County
- Troup County
Cities & Towns
- Hamilton (County Seat)
- Pine Mountain
- Shiloh
- Waverly Hall
- West Point (part)
Other Communities: Cataula, Ellerslie, Fortson (part), Midland (part), Mountain Hill, Ossahatchie, Pine Mountain Valley, Piney Grove, Rehobeth, Ridgeway and Whitesville
Links
National Register of Historic Places
USNS Harris County - T-LST-822
