Harris County, in west central Georgia on the Alabama border, is the state’s seventy-second county. Created in 1827 from parts of Muscogee and Troup counties, it was named after attorney and former Savannah mayor Charles Harris, the son-in-law of Lachlan McIntosh, a Revolutionary War (1775-83) patriot. The 464 square miles that make up Harris County were part of Creek Indian holdings until the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825. The first white settlers arrived soon after the forced removal of the Indians to take advantage of the state’s land lotteries.

The Hinman Research Building, built in 1939 as part of the "academic village" at Georgia Tech, was designed in the Bauhaus modern style by Paul M. Heffernan. Today the building houses the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print. Requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource should be submitted to the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center.

Horace King was the most respected bridge builder in west Georgia, Alabama, and northeast Mississippi from the 1830s until the 1880s. He constructed massive town lattice truss bridges over nearly every major river from the Oconee in Georgia to the Tombigbee in Mississippi and at nearly every crossing of the Chattahoochee River from Carroll County to Fort Gaines. Enslaved Artisan Born as an enslaved person of African, European, and Native American (Catawba) ancestry in Chesterfield District, South Carolina, King moved with his enslaver, John Godwin (1798-1859), a contractor, to Girard, Alabama, a suburb of Columbus, where Godwin had the contract to build the first public bridge connecting those two states.

Houses make up more than three-quarters of all the historic buildings in Georgia. They also constitute a highly diverse group of historic buildings. Because of Georgia’s architectural traditions, its historic houses must be understood and appreciated in terms of the building types they represent as well as their architectural styles. Indeed, the vast majority of historic houses in Georgia conform to recognized building types, while only about half exhibit architectural styles, and in many of these cases stylistic elements are secondary or applied.

Hugh McCall is generally regarded as Georgia’s first historian, based on his two-volume History of Georgia. The first volume was published in 1811, followed by the second in 1816. Details of his own life story remain elusive. Historian Otis Ashmore later noted the irony that McCall, “who with such commendable efforts rescued from oblivion many of the early traditions of our state, should himself have left scanty material for his own biographer.