Thirty points of interest on a self-guided map

By James Edgar Coleman

Fort Gaines, Georgia, sits on the southern end of Lake Walter F. George, high on a bluff overlooking the Chattahoochee River. This prominent position on the river has contributed to the interesting history of the town.

Artifacts place a large prehistoric Indian village on the site between 900 and 1400 AD, and more than two centuries ago the Creek Indians had a town of some size here. After the first Creek War in 1814, General Edmund Pendleton Gaines established a frontier fort on the site. Gaines was later noted for arguing against Indian removal. Built in 1816, the 100-square-foot fort was enclosed by a stockade eight feet high and garrisoned by Federal troops under General John Dill, who would later build a large home in the town. In 1836 a second fort was constructed to provide settlers with protection from Indian attacks. (A third fort, built in 1863, was intended to keep Union troops from going upriver to Columbus, an important city to the Confederacy for its shipbuilding, iron works and textile plants).

In the 1830s, Fort Gaines was chartered as a town and its real heyday began. One historical marker calls the town “Queen City of the Chattahoochee.” And so it was. A shipping point for cotton planters for many miles on both sides of the river, it was one of the most important points between Apalachicola and Columbus until the railroads arrived in 1858. Huge warehouses along the river held thousands of bales of cotton for shipping on large steamboats. Traces of the old cotton slide, leading down to the river warehouses still can be seen down the bluff. Boom times came again after the Civil War, as merchants came from Alabama and all around to sell their cotton. The town boasted several hotels, two newspapers and saloons everywhere. The decline set in with the ominous boll weevil depression of the 1910s.

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