The Brooks County Courthouse at Quitman: the Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia

• Publication year: 2011
• Pages: 0036
• Citation: Vol. 16 No. 5 Pg. 0036

The Brooks County Courthouse at Quitman: The Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia No. Vol. 16 No. 5 Pg. 36 Georgia Bar Journal February, 2011

GBJ Feature

by Wilber W. Caldwell

In the years just before the Civil War, The Atlantic and Gulf Railroad carved its narrow arching path from Savannah south and then westward through that seemingly endless monotony of pine known as the Wiregrass region of South Georgia. Almost magically it created counties and towns in the wilderness.

Just as the new road was being surveyed west of Valdosta, Brooks County was split off from Lowndes, and the new county seat of Quitman was laid out on the line of the proposed railroad. Where the rails entered Brooks County the landscape subtly changed. Graceful stands of long leaf pine began to appear, and the marginal sandy soil of the Pine Barrens darkened. Here was cotton, the fickle lover that would at once become both the salvation and the undoing of the postbellum South.

That there was wealth here in 1860 is clear, for in that year the citizens of the newly established Brooks County began a fine brick court building unlike any built along The Atlantic and Gulf between Savannah and Quitman before 1875. As county historian Folks Huxford so accurately puts it, "The undertaking to build such a pretentious and costly edifice in that day and time excited much surprise with some of the citizens . . . especially in the adjoining counties. Most courthouses were small frame affairs of rough lumber and unpainted."

To design their centerpiece, the Brooks County Commissioners turned to John Wind of...