The Habersham County Courthouse at Clarkesville: the Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 0026 |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 6 Pg. 0026 |
The Habersham County Courthouse at Clarkesville: The Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia
BY WILBER W. CALDWELL
Habersham County was created from the Cherokee Cession of 1818. Early records indicate that the county's first court sessions were held in the open a few miles from present day Clarkesville, which was laid out and designated the county seat in 1823. The first Habersham County Courthouse was a small wooden building built in 1821. This structure was still standing in 1979, but sadly it has since been demolished. It is unclear whether the old frame building was erected expressly as a courthouse, or whether it was a private residence used by the early court. Whatever the case, in 1829, Adiel Sherwood describes Clarkesville as having a "courthouse, a jail and 33 houses and stores." In 1832, only three years after Sherwood's publication, a monumental, if not graceful, brick courthouse was erected on Clarkesville's square.
In 1828, the discovery of gold in a narrow band stretching from Rabun County southwestward through Habersham, White and Lumpkin counties attracted population to the virtually unsettled mountain regions of Georgia and precipitated the abrupt removal of nearly 14,000 Cherokee Indians in 1835. On the eastern edge of this vast wilderness, Habersham County was only 10 years old when prospectors began to flood her theretofore-virgin forests in search of instant fortune. For the next 20 years, mining activity was brisk in North Georgia. As late as 1849, George White, in his "Statistics of the State of Georgia," lists six major mining sites in Habersham County. In the same 1849 text, White describes a massive courthouse as a building "of brick, but not very well arranged."
Thirty years later, according to Sholes' 1879 Gazetteer of Georgia, Clarkesville had a population of about 400, and enjoyed a modest success as a mountain resort. As the turn of the century approached, Clarkesville was still a very remote place. In a sense, it was the rural and detached quality of her mountain setting that set in motion the odd progression of events that ended in the creation this courthouse. Fifty years after Clarkesville was laid out, the town of Toccoa appeared along the newly laid rails of The Atlanta and Richmond Air Line in the eastern part of Habersham County. Twenty-five years later, Toccoa...
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