Hogansville: The Planter Who Gave Away His Land

Hogansville takes its name from William Hogan, a planter who made one of the more consequential land decisions in Troup County history.

Hogan established his plantation here in the eighteen thirties, along the old Augusta Highway in the rolling red-clay hills of west Georgia. In the eighteen forties, when the Atlanta and West Point Railroad was surveying its route, Hogan donated the right-of-way across his land on one condition: the railroad had to build a depot at the crossing. The depot was built, and a town grew up around it.

Hogan died at fifty-seven, never seeing the full result of his bargain. His son-in-law sold the surrounding land for homes and businesses, the town was chartered in eighteen seventy, and within a few decades Hogansville had grown into one of the best cotton markets in western Georgia. Today it sits just off Interstate Eighty-Five, a quiet city of about three thousand where the old downtown still carries traces of that cotton-era prosperity.