Macon, the seat of Bibb County, is the retail, medical, financial, educational, and cultural center of a still predominantly rural section of middle Georgia.

Named for North Carolina statesman and U.S.senator Nathaniel Macon, the city was established at the point where the Upper Coastal Plain rises to join the Piedmont, above which the Ocmulgee River is no longer navigable. That location makes it one of the South’s fall-line cities. While river transport was eventually replaced by rail, which a century later took a backseat to the intersection of two interstate highways, Macon’s location at the heart of Georgia’s transportation corridors has shaped its course even more than its mild climate and ample water resources have.

Macon Streetscape

As the commercial hub of a productive agricultural region, the city’s fortunes were tied to a southern cotton culture that brought substantial wealth, war, and subsequently genteel poverty for its first 100-plus years. Not until the infusion of people and monies that began with military preparations for World War II (1941-45) was the stage set for a stronger, more diversified economy. Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins (sixteen miles south of Macon), the largest industrial complex in the state, drives the region’s ongoing growth.

Early History

The land that became Macon/Bibb County was Indian Territory until 1821, nearly as pristine and undeveloped as Hernando de Soto found it when he rode through in 1540. Land-hungry Americans were eager to plow it into cotton fields. In 1821, demoralized by their defeat at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Creek Indians finally relinquished the area between the Ocmulgee and Flint rivers, as well as the Ocmulgee Old Fields, which had been withheld from the 1805 cession. Shortly thereafter the state legislature began carving the new land into counties and authorized the laying out of a town on the Ocmulgee’s west bank.

Fort Benjamin Hawkins
Fort Benjamin Hawkins
Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library.

With dozens of families already living around Fort Benjamin Hawkins, the 1806 frontier outpost on the east bank that had served as post office, trading “factory,” and military supplies distribution point for more than a decade, there was no shortage of bidders when the lots were put up for auction. Building began immediately, and the town was incorporated on December 8, 1823. Farmland in the surrounding countryside, distributed by lottery, was also quickly taken: ten years later the city boasted more than 3,000 “industrious and enterprising” inhabitants who had flocked to the area from New England, New York, and North Carolina; Bibb County had more than twice that number. Cotton was selling at twelve to sixteen cents a pound, and 69,000 bags of cotton were poled down the Ocmulgee River to Darien; there were three new banks with capital of $1 million, and merchandise in stores was estimated at like value. Farmers came to Macon from more than sixty miles around to do business, and money was plentiful.

As spreading cultivation lessened rainwater runoff, however, the Ocmulgee River narrowed, and navigation soon proved impossible without constant dredging. Realizing that rail offered the best protection for their mercantile interests, Macon entrepreneurs convened a statewide meeting that led to the legislature’s decision to build track from the Chattahoochee River to Chattanooga, Tennessee—extending the reach of the Monroe Railroad they had previously launched. The same men also convinced the city of Macon to buy 2,500 shares of stock in the Central Railroad, so as to connect Macon to Savannah. Other railroads followed, and by 1860 Macon had secured its place as the intrastate center of Georgia’s 1,400 miles of track. (Atlanta’s superior connection to interstate transport was an unforeseen consequence.)

Commerce remained the backbone of Macon’s economy, but by 1860 manufacturing had gained a foothold: there were several foundries, brickyards, and tellingly, a cotton mill. Its population having grown to 8,132 (15,952 in the county), Macon was the fifth largest city in the state. Real estate was valued at $4,717,551, and personal property (most of it in enslaved laborers) at $10,279,574.

Macon Depot

While some of Macon’s most influential citizens held Unionist views, news of South Carolina’s secession from the Union in December 1860 was nevertheless greeted with yells of excitement, firing guns, ringing bells, and a torchlight procession through town; preparations for defense began immediately. Macon-area military action during the Civil War (1861-65), however, was limited to an unsuccessful if dramatic 1864 assault from the east by an inept Yankee general bent on freeing Union prisoners while Union general William T. Sherman attacked Atlanta (just one stray cannonball fell inside the city limits).

Accordingly, Macon’s relative safety encouraged thousands of people from the surrounding countryside to take refuge in the city. Macon served the Confederate cause in multiple ways: it was a depository for Confederate gold, and its arsenal, laboratory, and armory manufactured tons of needed ordnance. Macon’s Camp Oglethorpe held prisoners of war who were officers, and many of its buildings became hospitals for wounded soldiers arriving by rail from battlefields to the north. When news of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, arrived in Macon, General Howell Cobb’s prompt and cooperative surrender ensured that the Union troops occupied the city without destroying it.

Macon City Hall

Losses from the war were more than military and political. In 1870 real estate values were comparable to what they had been ten years earlier, but personal property—reflecting emancipation—totaled only $2,697,590, a drop of 74 percent. More painful, there were 487 new widows and 913 new orphans in the city. Reconstruction saw Blacks in new roles as aldermen, legislators, postmasters, and congressmen, but that revolution was, to use W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase, “a splendid failure” and did not last. Having won their freedom, the freedpeople soon found themselves newly tied to the land by sharecropping and tenancy systems; that, coupled with agriculture’s continued dependence on cotton, kept regional per capita income low until the boll weevil brought it even lower after World War I (1917-18). Like the rest of the South, Macon did not have the capital to develop its resources.

Still, the city managed to acquire the trappings of modern urban life: an expanded water system, sanitary sewers, telephones, electricity, streetcars, paved sidewalks, and over many years, paved streets. The Board of Public Education was established, Central City Park was developed, a city hospital opened in a former school, and a public library was organized. New citizens emigrated from outlying areas and other southern states, and the city increased its size by annexing Vineville, Hugenin Heights, Cherokee Heights, and East and South Macon. The Bibb Manufacturing Company, organized in 1876, dominated the local economy with multiple textile plants and mill villages, but the newly bred “Elberta” peach and refrigerated railroad cars brought the peach industry to life, and the organization of new banks and railroads enhanced business activity.

Macon Railway and Light Company
Macon Railway and Light Company
Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library.

Later History

Macon’s active volunteer militias had joined the battle every time the United States took up arms, even (despite lingering animosities from the recent fight with the Union) the Spanish-American War (1898) and raid into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa. Soldiers had trained at camps in Macon; thus it was natural, when America’s entry into World War I became obvious, for Macon Chamber of Commerce leaders to aggressively seek military training facilities. Their efforts succeeded in bringing tens of thousands of “Doughboys” and a significant monthly payroll to Camp Wheeler, just east of Macon at Holly Bluff in 1917, and the community’s hospitable embrace of the soldiers paved the way for the camp’s reactivation in World War II (1941-45). (The Ocmulgee East Industrial Park and Macon’s Downtown Airport are now located on its site.) But World War II brought additional installations: a naval ordnance plant, a training center for British Royal Air Force pilots at Cochran Field, and most important, with the help of Congressman Carl Vinson, the enormous Robins Air Force Base for which Maconites purchased 3,108 acres in adjacent Houston County to give to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Cherry Street in Macon
Cherry Street in Macon
Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library.

The long-term impact of these facilities, especially Robins, cannot be overestimated. They led to industrial and demographic changes that, in conjunction with social and technological changes, altered local culture in ways that continue to reverberate. If Macon had ever been, as it was once described, “more interested in the graces and pleasures of reciprocal hospitality than in commercial enterprises,” the phrase was no longer apt. The postwar boom saw northern firms establish so many new plants (to capitalize on such local resources as pulpwood, kaolin, and tobacco) that industrial employment soared from 6,500 in 1940 to 16,000 in 1949. Additionally, cotton’s grip on agriculture loosened as farmers began raising poultry, peanuts, and soybeans, and farms became larger as mechanization and migration to jobs in cities eroded the destructive tenancy system.

Georgia State Farmers Market, 1949
Georgia State Farmers Market, 1949
Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library.

With non-southerners and Blacks moving into the city, and growing numbers of whites moving into adjacent counties, Macon’s social homogeneity gave way to greater diversity, a process that was significantly accelerated by the civil rights movement. The city managed to end de jure segregation without bloodshed or property damage. The burgeoning contemporary music scene may have helped to facilitate these changes; white youths broke racial barriers by attending City Auditorium concerts by homegrown Black artists Little RichardOtis Redding, and James Brown in the 1960s. Such cultural crossover laid the groundwork for the Macon–Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau’s twenty-first century community brand: “Soul Lives Here.”

Otis Redding

Macon Today

Just as Macon leaders had pushed for railroads in the nineteenth century, they sought good highway connections in the twentieth: the juncture of Interstates 75 and 16 in the 1960s, the Fall Line Freeway in the 1990s. Other infrastructure needs were not neglected. In recent decades, voters have also approved local measures to support road-improvement and local schools as well as a water treatment plant and reservoir.

Downtown Macon
Downtown Macon
Courtesy of Explore Georgia.

The end of the twentieth century saw Macon’s economic focus shift from agriculture and industry to retail and service, with health care, financial and insurance employment, and tourism becoming increasingly important. A regional mall opened in West Macon in 1975, reorienting retail activity from downtown to the Eisenhower Parkway; The Macon Mall expanded thereafter, eventually enclosing thirty acres, before it entered a steep decline in the twenty-first century. In 2021 the mall was deeded to the local government and slated for redevelopment. The Atrium Health Navicent Medical Center (formerly the Medical Center of Central Georgia), founded in 1895, is one of four Level One trauma centers in the state and is ranked one of the 100 top-performing hospitals in the country. Nearly 10,000 people work in white-collar jobs at insurance and financial firms.

Downtown Macon
Downtown Macon
Courtesy of Explore Georgia.

In 2012 residents in Macon and Bibb County voted to consolidate city and county governments. The newly constituted Macon-Bibb County, which features a mayor and ten person board of commissioners, took effect in 2014. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Macon-Bibb County had a population of 157,346.

The annual Cherry Blossom Festival draws throngs during March, when more than 200,000 trees are in bloom, and the Ocmulgee Mounds, now part of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, which was established in the 1930s to preserve and interpret the mounds, has been joined by more than a dozen museums and historic houses in offering year-round programs for visitors. A host of performing arts activities gives Maconites opportunities to enjoy dance, theater, and musical performances (including its own symphony) in a variety of venues. And in a swing back to the city’s roots, the revitalization of downtown led by an energetic civic effort has opened access to the Ocmulgee River via a park and greenway.

Cherry Blossom Festival
Cherry Blossom Festival
Courtesy of Explore Georgia.

As might be expected in a more democratic era, leadership in Macon no longer rests with the business elite or elected officials; numerous citizens groups, organized and ad hoc, make their voices heard on community issues.

Architectural Bounty

General Sherman passed to the east of Macon on his way to Savannah, sparing the city from the destruction that Union soldiers caused on their march to the sea. The pace of economic activity in Macon frequently meant adapting rather than replacing structures as patterns of commerce and living changed; as a result the city has an extensive inventory of fine old buildings, many of great historic and/or architectural significance. As of 2023, fifteen historic districts, containing more than 6,000 structures, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two homes, the Hay House (open to the public) and the Raines-Carmichael House (private) are National Historic Landmarks.

Hay House

Antebellum cotton wealth is still visible in what writer Bret Harte described in 1874 as “lordly houses of the great slave-owners” in the Intown and Vineville historic districts, which provide a sharp contrast to the simple frame “shotgun” houses occupied by Blacks in nearby Pleasant Hill. Greek revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne predominate, but there are many other architectural styles as well. Macon’s commercial history is written in brick and stone upon its mercantile buildings downtown. Its devotion to religious expression can be seen in the Gothic, neo-Gothic, Romanesque, and even Byzantine-influenced houses of worship located in all sections of the city.

Religion

It has been said that Macon has more churches per capita than any other city in the South; clearly, religious life has been an important part of the community from its earliest years, exerting both spiritual and political influence. The Episcopalians were the first denomination to organize (1825), joined shortly by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians (1826), which entities continue in existence as Christ Church (Episcopal), First Baptist on High Street, Mulberry Methodist, and First Presbyterian. Other faiths followed: Catholics in the 1830s, Jews in the 1840s, the Christian denomination in the 1880s, Christian Scientists in the 1890s, and by the turn of the century, Adventists, Theosophists, Free Methodists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Nazarenes, and Free Will and Primitive Baptists.

In the late twentieth century came Evangelicals, Church of God, Holiness, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, Mormons, Muslims, and Baha’i. African Americans worshiped in their enslavers’ churches during slavery but broke into separate congregations after the Civil War and now represent numerous denominations, many of which are independent. Of the more than 250 congregations in Macon, by far the greatest number has been Baptist, with Methodist a distant second, but increasing numbers are non- or interdenominational.

Education

People who seek their fortunes in frontier towns may have a particular interest in improving the next generation; for whatever reason Macon embarked on a substantial number of educational ventures that have left significant marks on the city.

One of the earliest was the desire to establish a college “to burst the shackles of ignorance and superstition which had bound woman for three thousand years.” A group of citizens pledged $9,000 to purchase five acres on a “commanding eminence” halfway between downtown and Vineville and offered it to the Methodist Conference, which obtained a legislative charter in 1836. Thus did Wesleyan College become the first college in the United States chartered to grant degrees to women. The liberal arts school moved to a 200-acre campus in the town of Rivoli, six miles northwest of the original site, in 1928; its conservatory of music, a program close to the community’s heart, remained on Macon’s College Street until early 1953.

Wesleyan College

In 1852 subscriptions were raised to launch a school to educate blind children, after which the state was petitioned to charter and endow what continues to be the Georgia Academy for the Blind. A Negro Division, opened in 1882, was integrated into the Vineville branch in 1965, at which time the mission was expanded to include training for multidisabled children. The only residential school for the visually impaired in Georgia, the academy receives funds from the state and federal governments.

Other institutions founded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries no longer exist but illustrate the trend: an eclectic medical college located in Macon in midcentury is credited with graduating Georgia’s first female doctor before moving to Atlanta in 1881. Pio Nono College, named for Pope Pius the Ninth, was founded by the Catholic Church in 1874 but became St. Stanislaus in 1889 when Jesuits acquired the school to train initiates for the Jesuit priesthood; it burned in 1921 and was never rebuilt.

The Georgia-Alabama Business College was established in 1889, graduating tens of thousands of stenographers, secretaries, bookkeepers, auditors, accountants, and linotype operators during its sixty-year life. Central City College was organized by the Missionary Baptist denomination in 1899 on 235 acres in east Macon, providing the only academic higher education for Blacks in Macon throughout its existence. Destroyed by fire in 1921, the college was rebuilt and continued until the 1950s, when, known at the time as Georgia Baptist College, it closed due to financial problems. Minnie L. Smith used her own financial resources to open Beda-Etta College in 1921, erecting a three-story brick building in Pleasant Hill; its course of study was primarily business and commercial.

After the Civil War, the city competed with other Georgia towns to convince Mercer University, a Baptist school founded as Mercer Institute in 1833, to move from Penfield to Macon, offering six acres west of Tattnall Square Park and $125,000 in municipal bonds. The bid was accepted, and classes began in Macon in 1871. Mercer University is the second largest Baptist-affiliated institution in the world, with a campus in Atlanta in addition to the one in Macon, and the only university of its size to offer programs in liberal arts, business, education, engineering, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and theology. The medical and engineering schools have had a particular impact on the local economy, supplying doctors to rural Georgia while reinforcing Macon’s role as a regional medical center and providing engineers for the “Aerospace Alley” industries drawn by Robins Air Force Base.

Administration Building
Administration Building
Courtesy of Mercer University

Central Georgia Technical College was founded as Macon Area Vocational-Technical School by the Bibb Board of Education in 1962 and later became part of the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education (later the Technical College System of Georgia). Central Georgia Tech offers technical studies designed to meet the needs of employers in the eleven-county area that the school serves.

Macon leaders had sought a unit of the University System of Georgia for half a century before succeeding, via a bond issue, in opening Macon State College in 1968. Originally a two-year community college, the school grew rapidly while serving a part-time commuter student body, many of whom went on to attend a four-year institution within the University System. In 1997 the college was authorized to offer a number of critically needed four-year programs. In 2013 the school merged with Middle Georgia College to form Middle Georgia State College (later Middle Georgia State University).

Museums

Macon has a variety of historical attractions. Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, site of a number of mysterious mounds on the east side of the river, traces 10,000 years of Native American occupation of the Macon Plateau. The Museum of Arts and Sciences presents planetarium shows and exhibitions in art, science, and the humanities. The Tubman African American Museum is devoted to interpreting African American art, culture, and history. The Georgia Sports Hall of Fame offers interactive exhibitions illustrating the history of sport in the state and honoring exceptional Georgia athletes, and the Georgia Children’s Museum offers interactive exhibitions and programs, including theatrical productions, summer camp, and a television studio. The Georgia Music Hall of Fame museum operated in downtown Macon from 1996 until 2011.

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.

Several house museums provide glimpses of Macon’s architectural and cultural past: the Cannonball House and Museum on Mulberry Street, the only Macon home damaged during the brief 1864 assault on the city, interprets the Civil War; the Hay House on Georgia Avenue, an elaborate 1855 Italianate villa remarkable for having been among the first homes in the country to incorporate indoor plumbing and central heat, also houses notable art and furnishings. Mercer University’s Woodruff House, an 1836 Greek revival–style mansion atop Coleman Hill, is open during festivals and special events.

Just fifteen minutes north of the city in Jones County, the Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site (ca. 1840s) illustrates a medium-sized Georgia cotton plantation turned family farm. The 35,000-acre Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge is ten minutes northeast of Jarrell; it offers extensive nature trails, a wildlife drive, fishing ponds, and interactive natural history displays in its visitors’ center. The Piedmont staff also administers the 6,500-acre Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Bibb County.

Jarrell Plantation Historic Site
Jarrell Plantation Historic Site
Image from B A Bowen Photography

Thirty minutes south of Macon the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base features more than ninety aircraft and exhibitions that span a century of flight.

Performing Arts

Macon has two active community theaters. Macon Little Theater, founded in the 1930s, and Theatre Macon, established in the 1980s, offer full seasons of theatrical productions, as well as youth companies. The Macon Symphony also presents a full season and sponsors numerous outreach activities. A number of other venues offer additional cultural programming: the late-nineteenth-century Grand Opera House, restored in the 1970s, seats more than 1,000; the 400-seat Douglass Theatre, established by African American entrepreneur Charles Douglass in the 1920s and restored in the 1990s, has 70mm film capability; the Macon Centreplex, consisting of the 9,252-seat Macon Coliseum, the 2,688-seat City Auditorium (with reportedly the largest copper dome in the world), and the Edgar H. Wilson Convention Center, is the state’s largest convention complex outside of metropolitan Atlanta.

Current Business and Industry

The Macon Telegraph is Macon’s oldest business, having been in continuous publication since 1826. Owner Peyton Anderson sold it, with the now-defunct afternoon News, to Knight Ridder in 1969. Another major employer in Macon is GEICO, a direct service insurance company, which placed one of its six regional sales’ claims and services offices in the Ocmulgee East Industrial Park in 1974. The other major firm in the same industrial park is the YKK Corporation of America, whose national zipper-manufacturing center (the world’s largest) produces millions of zippers a day.

Macon Telegraph Building
Macon Telegraph Building
Courtesy of Peyton Anderson Foundation

In 2006 the Royal Danish Consulate opened in Macon, the first foreign consulate in the city. A year later the Principality of Liechtenstein Consulate also opened in Macon.

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A More Perfect Union

The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Macon Streetscape

Macon Streetscape

Downtown Macon still retains most of its original historic buildings, which have been preserved and revitalized as its residents take an interest in their city's past.

Nathaniel Macon

Nathaniel Macon

The city of Macon was named for Nathaniel Macon, a North Carolina statesman and U.S. senator.

Bibb County Courthouse

Bibb County Courthouse

Bibb County's fourth courthouse, completed in 1924, was remodeled in 1940 as a WPA project. It is an example of neoclassical revival architecture.

Courtesy of Don Bowman

Fort Benjamin Hawkins

Fort Benjamin Hawkins

Indian Superintendent Benjamin Hawkins personally selected the location of Fort Benjamin Hawkins, which was built to protect settlers from the Creeks. Despite Hawkins's fear that the Creeks would attack the settlement, no problems arose during the fifteen years that the fort was used as an outpost. Fort Hawkins was later used as a supply hub during the War of 1812.

Macon Depot

Macon Depot

In 1992 Congress passed a transportation bill that provided enhancement funding for historic and natural resources associated with transportation routes and facilities, such as Macon's railroad depot.

Macon City Hall

Macon City Hall

Macon City Hall, constructed in 1837, was used as a field hospital during the Civil War and served as the temporary state capitol during the final months of the war. This photograph of the building was taken in 1894.

Macon Railway and Light Company

Macon Railway and Light Company

Workers from the Macon Railway and Light Company gather around 1900 for a portrait. Following the Civil War, the city of Macon began to acquire such modern conveniences as a water system, telephones, and streetcars.

Cherry Street in Macon

Cherry Street in Macon

This photograph captures Cherry Street, a main throughfare in Macon, during the 1890s.

Georgia State Farmers Market, 1949

Georgia State Farmers Market, 1949

The Georgia State Farmers Market, located on Oglethorpe Street in Macon, provided a venue for the new crops, including chickens, peanuts, and soybeans, being raised by farmers during the 1940s.

Downtown Macon

Downtown Macon

Macon is now a top tourist destination in the state of Georgia, due in part to its unique mix of historic and contemporary attractions.

Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.

Downtown Macon

Downtown Macon

A row of storefronts in downtown Macon. The end of the twentieth century saw Macon's economic focus shift from agriculture and industry to retail and service.

Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Geoff L. Johnson.

Cherry Blossom Festival

Cherry Blossom Festival

Macon's annual Cherry Blossom Festival draws throngs during March when more than 200,000 trees are in bloom around the city.

Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.

Hay House

Hay House

The Hay House (1855-59) in Macon is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public for tours. At the time it was built, the house was among the first in the country to feature hot and cold running water, central heating, an in-house kitchen, a speaker-tube system, and an elaborate ventilation system.

Wesleyan College

Wesleyan College

Wesleyan College in Macon was chartered in 1836 as the first college in the United States to grant degrees to women. Construction began in 1839, and the college has undergone several expansions since that time. This photograph was taken sometime after an expansion that occurred prior to 1876.

Administration Building

Administration Building

The administration building at Mercer University is situated in the center of its Macon campus. The second largest Baptist-affiliated institution in the world, Mercer moved from Penfield to Macon in 1871.

Courtesy of Mercer University

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park

The chiefdom of Ichisi was located between modern Macon and Perry on the Ocmulgee River. The capital town was probably located at the present-day Lamar archaeological site, a part of Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park.

Woodruff House

Woodruff House

The Woodruff House, located on the Mercer University campus in Macon, is a Greek revival-style mansion built in 1836. The house is open during festivals and other special events.

Image from suzieqzi

View on source site

Jarrell Plantation Historic Site

Jarrell Plantation Historic Site

This cotton plantation was owned by the Jarrell family for 140 years. Many antebellum furnishings are on display at the historic site, and many outbuildings dating back to about 1900 still stand.

Image from B A Bowen Photography

View on source site

Macon Telegraph Building

Macon Telegraph Building

The Macon Telegraph was housed in this building, pictured in the early 1950s, during the editorship of Peyton Anderson Jr.

Courtesy of Peyton Anderson Foundation

Otis Redding

Otis Redding

The music scene in Macon during the 1960s played a role in desegregating the city when white teenagers attended concerts by such Black performers as Little Richard, Otis Redding, and James Brown.

Macon, ca. 1925

Macon, ca. 1925

Aerial view of downtown Macon, circa 1925.

Third Street Park

Third Street Park

Macon's Third Street Park stretches from Plum Street to Walnut Street. Cherry trees line the walkways.

Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.