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Beginning in 1757 Georgia’s colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols. Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in “An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols” that groups “not exceeding seven” would work in districts twelve miles square. The statute, modeled on South Carolina’s earlier patrol law, ordered white adults to ride the roads at night, stopping all enslaved laborers they encountered and making them prove that they were engaged in lawful activities.

Slave quarters, pictured in 1936, stand at Liberty Hall in Taliaferro County, the homeplace of Georgia governor Alexander Stephens. African American structures on Georgia plantations were generally rectangular in shape, as opposed to the square forms preferred by Europeans. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey. 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.

Spalding County, in west central Georgia, was created in 1851 by the state legislature from parts of Fayette, Henry, and Pike counties. Forty miles south of downtown Atlanta, Spalding is part of the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area and one of six counties in the Towaliga Soil and Water Conservation District. Comprising 198 square miles, the county was named for Thomas Spalding, an influential statesman and planter from coastal Georgia. Early History The incorporated communities in Spalding County are Griffin, Orchard Hill, and Sunny Side.

The Spanish chapter of Georgia’s earliest colonial history is dominated by the lengthy mission era, extending from 1568 through 1684. Catholic missions were the primary means by which Georgia’s indigenous Native American chiefdoms were assimilated into the Spanish colonial system along the northern frontier of greater Spanish Florida. Establishment of Missions Following the largely unsuccessful conversion efforts of Jesuit priests between 1568 and 1570, friars of the Franciscan Order spearheaded the establishment of missions among Indian groups near Florida’s Spanish colonial city, St.