Cartersville: The Town Named as a Joke

After Georgia removed the Cherokee Nation in eighteen thirty-eight, surveyors laid out the Western and Atlantic Railroad through the red clay hills south of Dalton. The settlement there, first called Birmingham, dated to eighteen thirty-two. A prominent North Georgia planter named Colonel Farrish Carter passed through so frequently that he joked the town ought to just go ahead and name itself after him.

The residents took him up on it. Incorporated as Cartersville in the eighteen fifties, the town became the county seat of Bartow County after the Civil War, when Sherman's troops burned the former seat at Cassville to the ground in eighteen sixty-four. What started as a planter's offhand quip became the courthouse town of a Georgia county.