Statesboro, Georgia

Statesboro sits in a corner of Georgia that the outside world mostly overlooked , until cotton made it briefly the most important market of its kind on earth. The Georgia Legislature created the town in eighteen oh three on land donated by a local landowner for a county seat. The settlement started with fewer than twenty-five people.

By the early nineteen hundreds, Bulloch County had become the largest Sea Island cotton-producing county in the world. Sea Island cotton was the finest long-staple variety grown in America, prized by textile mills in England and New England for thread so smooth it could be woven into muslin. In nineteen oh eight, Statesboro was selling ten bales for every single one sold in Savannah , an astonishing concentration of wealth in what had been a tiny crossroads town.

That prosperity rested entirely on the labor of Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and it generated terrifying violence when the racial order felt threatened. In August of nineteen oh four, two Black men named Paul Reed and Will Cato were convicted of murdering a white farm family. State militia had been sent to protect them, but the moment their trials ended, a mob of at least one hundred men seized them, marched them to woods north of town, chained them to a tree stump, and burned them alive. The violence spread: four more Black residents were shot, three fatally, and women were flogged. The event received national press coverage. Seventy-three lynchings occurred in Georgia that year alone , more than in any other state. Thousands of Black residents began leaving Bulloch County, taking with them the very labor the cotton economy depended on.

The boll weevil finished what the terror had started. By the nineteen thirties the cotton crop was gone. Statesboro rebuilt around tobacco, then around Georgia Southern University, chartered in nineteen oh six. Today the university is the town's largest employer and its defining institution , a different kind of future than the one the Sea Island cotton kings once imagined.