Mitchell County: Wiregrass Cotton and the Peanut Belt

Mitchell County, established in eighteen fifty-seven in the flat longleaf pine and wiregrass country of southwest Georgia, sits in the heart of what became the state's most intensively farmed agricultural belt. Named for a Georgia figure named Mitchell, though sources disagree on which one, the county was built on Sea Island cotton in its early decades, then shifted to peanuts and pecans as the boll weevil devastated cotton crops across the Deep South after nineteen fifteen.

Today Mitchell County is one of the most majority-minority counties in Georgia, with a Black population nearly equal to its white population, a legacy of the plantation economy and the sharecropping system that followed. The county seat of Camilla was the site of a violent attack on Black citizens on September nineteenth, eighteen sixty-eight, when a political rally organized by freedpeople was fired upon by a white mob, killing an estimated nine to fifteen people. The Camilla Massacre was one of the largest acts of racial violence during Reconstruction in Georgia, and it shaped voting rights in the state for a generation.