Peachtree City: Creek Homeland to Golf-Cart Suburb

Long before the golf carts, this ground belonged to the Lower Creek Nation. Fayette County sits on land the Muscogee Creek had occupied for millennia, and their villages were well established when European contact began reshaping the region. Chief William McIntosh, son of a Scottish officer and a Creek woman, signed the Treaty of Indian Springs in eighteen twenty-one, ceding these lands to the federal government.

His own people executed him for it in eighteen twenty-five, judging it a betrayal. The state of Georgia distributed the ceded acres by lottery, and white settlers converted them to small farms growing cotton and grain. That agricultural pattern held for over a century.

Then in the nineteen fifties a development company called Bessemer Securities quietly assembled more than ten thousand acres in Fayette County. Peachtree City was chartered on March ninth, nineteen fifty-nine, with an ambitious master plan for separate villages linked by trails. City planners added a golf cart path network in nineteen seventy-four, and today more than ten thousand households own carts.

It has one of the most extensive golf cart path networks in the world.