Emerson, Georgia

Emerson is a small Bartow County town whose identity is shaped almost entirely by a single industrial landmark: the Etowah Mounds. The ancient earthworks sit just east of town along the Etowah River, where a Mississippian culture community of perhaps one thousand to three thousand people built platform mounds between roughly one thousand and fifteen hundred fifty AD. The principal mound rises sixty-three feet, one of the largest earthen structures in the eastern United States, and was the seat of a chiefdom that traded across the continent.

The modern town incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine around a railroad stop once called Stegall's Station, and was named for Georgia governor Joseph Emerson Brown. Today Emerson has a population of around fifteen hundred, and the Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site beside it draws visitors from across the region.