Cherokee Indians originally inhabited the land that would become Jasper. In 1805 the U.S. government, looking to create greater unity among the new nation's citizens and to facilitate trade, authorized the creation of the Federal Road, which connected Georgia with Tennessee and Alabama and passed through the future town of Jasper. The creation of the road, however, did not spur growth in the region, which remained populated largely by Cherokees. Even after the forced removal of the Cherokees in 1838, whites ignored the Jasper area in favor of the state's gold regions to the south and east.
The Civil War (1861-65) bitterly divided Jasper's residents. Town leaders voted against secession, and in 1860 several residents protested Georgia's decision to leave the Union by raising and guarding a U.S. flag in front of the county courthouse. Citizens from the town served in both the Confederate and Union armies, and during the war troops from both sides occupied the town at different times, often with bloody results.
Jasper grew slowly after the war. In 1867 the town consisted of several residences, two churches, a log jail, a hotel, a Masonic lodge, a brick courthouse, a liquor store, and several other businesses. A few buildings, including the courthouse, were brick, but most were log. One of Georgia's first marble quarries operated immediately east of the new county seat. The 1880 census records the population as 146.
Jasper suffered less than many of Georgia's rural communities during the first decades of the twentieth century. The town felt the effects of the cotton economy's collapse in the 1920s and of the Great Depression in general. The expansion of the Georgia Marble Company in the 1920s, however, brought jobs and new residents to the area. The town also benefited from the New Deal's rural electrification program when the town's Amicalola Electric Membership Corporation began to provide power to surrounding areas in 1940.
Beginning in 1967 Jasper attracted new light manufacturing businesses, a modern hospital, and the Pickens Area Vocational-Technical School (later Chattahoochee Technical College). Cotton production no longer plays a prominent role in the local economy, but timber harvesting and mining continue to dominate the town's financial landscape.
Robert S. Davis, "'The Business of Life': A Case Study of Using Credit Reports in a Community History in Pickens County, North Georgia," Chattanooga Regional Historical Journal 5 (2002): 55-82.
Robert S. Davis Jr., Pickens Past: A Photographic History of Pickens County, Georgia (Roswell, Ga.: Wolfe, 1995).
Pickens County Heritage Book Committee, Pickens County, Georgia Heritage, 1853-1998 (Waynesville, N.C.: Don Mills, 1998).
Luke E. Tate, History of Pickens County (Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1978).
Robert Scott Davis Jr., Wallace State College, Hanceville, Alabama
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