Greensboro, Georgia

Greensboro is the seat of Greene County, one of Georgia's oldest counties, chartered in seventeen eighty-six and named for the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, who died that same year. The town was laid out along Richland Creek and incorporated in eighteen oh three. By the eighteen fifties, Greene County had become Georgia's largest cotton-producing county, and Greensboro stood at its commercial center.

The Georgia Railroad reached town in eighteen thirty-eight, making it easier than ever to move cotton to the coast. That antebellum wealth is still visible in the cluster of Greek Revival and Federal-style buildings that survived the Civil War. Today Greensboro is perhaps best known as the gateway to Lake Oconee, the state's second-largest lake, built by Georgia Power in nineteen seventy-nine, which brought a new wave of resort and residential development to the old cotton-country landscape.