The Carroll County Courthouse at Carrollton: the Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 0036 |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 3 Pg. 0036 |
BY WILBER W. CALDWELL
Carroll County was created in 1826, and her first court building was a 20' by 20' log structure erected at Carrollton around 1829, shortly after the county seat had been moved from its original site at "Old Carrollton." In 1837, Adiel Sherwood in his Gazetteer of Georgia reports that Carrollton consisted of eight or 10 houses and two stores. In that year, a frame courthouse replaced the first crude building. By 1851, as the west Georgia fields turned white with cotton, a typical brick vernacular court building rose to meet the growing administrative and judicial needs of the Carroll County's 9,357 residents, only 250 of whom lived in Carrollton, the county's largest town. The broad cornice and paired brackets supporting the eaves are typical of vernacular rural public buildings of the era. A particularly elegant air was achieved using bold brick pilasters that divided the facade into narrow vertical bays. The use of tied pairs of these great pier-like members to close the end bays and stress the sides of the composition is a rather sophisticated device for such a crude building. It is a technique that was often used in Italian Renaissance palaces and was most likely inspired by one of the many builders' guides or pattern books available to builders of the day.
With the arrival of The Central of Georgia's Savannah, Griffin and North Alabama Railroad in 1874, Carrollton would experience her own brief boom as an area cotton market. One historian contends that the number of businesses in town doubled between 1871 and 1873. Whatever the case, Carrollton's boom was brief. The Central abandoned work on the westward extension after its arrival in Carrollton, and the town was destined to occupy the end of this lonely spur for almost 15 years. Still, with the railroad's arrival, Carrollton prospered, shipping more than 15,000 bales annually from this depot in the late 1880s. As the decade ended, Carrollton had her own bank and a population of nearly 1,500. But, as always, dreams of a New South would eventually crumble when supported only by the flimsy foundations of cotton.
In 1888, rising prospects created by the long-awaited arrival of The Chattanooga, Rome and Columbus Railroad sparked a new courthouse movement in Carrollton. Only a little more than a year after the new rails...
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