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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Union County, Georgia.
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Union County was originally a core part of the homeland of the native Cherokee tribe. Mountainous and formerly one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Georgia, the area became the object of desire for white settlers with the discovery of gold in the 1820s. While the gold rush didn't last long, a land lottery system opened up the area for settlement in the 1830s and Union County was formed in 1832.
The newcomers formed political groups to force the Cherokee off their land, part of the removal of most of the southeastern native tribes in what is known as the Trail of Tears. The part that was Cherokee Removal occurred between 1836 and 1839. The Cherokee nation and roughly 1,600 of their black slaves were forced west to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the then Western United States. The resultant deaths along the way and at the end of the movement of an estimated 4,000 Cherokee. The Union Party was a political group that supported removing the Indians and opening the area to white settlers and is the probable reason for the county's name.
The white population of Union County residents were largely pro-Union in the years prior to the Civil War, with sentiments against the plantation-owning aristocratic elites in the lowland sections of the state, as was true of much of Georgia's mountainous north and the Appalachian region in general. When the state seceded and when Lincoln raised a Union army to suppress the rebellion, most Union County residents supported the Confederacy and most of the soldiers from the county fought on the Confederate side either as enlistees or, after the Confederate draft of 1862, as draftees. Joseph E. Brown, the wartime governor of Georgia, was a resident of Union County, having moved there from western South Carolina.[6] Brown was an ardent secessionist and a defender of slavery, but was a controversial southern governor, a north Georgian never fully accepted by the plantation class but still popular with the common white Georgians, whom he championed. Brown vehemently opposed the Confederate draft and was a constant thorn in the side of the central Confederate government which he saw as usurping increasing power from the states. Despite general support for the Confederacy, a smaller number of Union sympathizers remained in Union County, which was one of the few Georgia counties to provide men for a Union Army unit, company A of the 1st Georgia Infantry Battalion, in which 6 men were killed.
Adjacent Counties
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Chattahoochee Nat'l Forest (part)