By 1953 more than 20 million pounds of tobacco passed through warehouses in Statesboro, which was then the largest market in the “bright Tobacco Belt” spanning Georgia and Florida. This transition allowed the community to recover from the Great Depression more quickly than most. For each bale of cotton sold in Savannah, ten bales were sold in Statesboro.īrannen and Smith Statesboro Ginnery Courtesy of Georgia Archives.Īfter the boll weevil decimated the cotton crop in the 1930s, local farmers shifted to another cash crop: tobacco. In 1908 it led the world in sales of long-staple Sea Island cotton. Statesboro was poised to become the market of choice. Twentieth Centuryĭuring the first decade of the twentieth century, cotton became king in south Georgia. Led by enterprising newcomers, Statesboro’s leaders developed a progressive local government and nourished an economy geared to serve the interest of regional farmers. New stores sprang up along the town’s four major streets, each named Main. Within a few years a newspaper was started then local businessmen funded a vital link to the Central of Georgia Railway. Brannen, who moved to Statesboro in 1879. The original visionary was a young lawyer from Bryan County named J. Leadership for the town came from outside of Bulloch County. The proprietor replied, “You are standing in the middle of town.” The soldiers destroyed only the courthouse-a crude log structure that served as a barn when court was not in session. Sherman’s march to the sea approached a saloon in the middle of a forest in Bulloch County. In the autumn of 1864, during the Civil War (1861-65), a Union commanding officer on General William T. Other communities prospered in the post- Reconstruction economy, but Statesboro emerged as a major town in southeastern Georgia. During the next two decades, however, the county seat experienced a period of dramatic expansion.

The census for 1880 reveals 1,036 residents in the town’s militia district and 8,053 in the growing county. In 1866 the state legislature granted a permanent charter and changed the spelling of the name to its present form, Statesboro, but growth did not follow. Bulloch County Courthouse Photograph by Jimmy Emerson, DVM Nineteenth Centuryįor the next eighty years the town remained small and seemed irrelevant to this rural Cotton Belt county, which was bustling with immigrants whose roots traced to the British Isles.

Statesboro herald