Waco, Georgia

Waco, Georgia, has nothing to do with Texas. It sits in Haralson County two and a half miles southwest of Bremen along the Georgia Pacific Railroad, and in eighteen ninety its population of three hundred fifty-seven was larger than either Bremen or the county seat at Buchanan. The town had water-powered mills on Turkey Creek that processed cotton, wool, and grain, and it was a shipping point for cotton and lumber. It had been incorporated in eighteen eighty-five, going by Wacoville before settling on just Waco.

Then Bremen grew, the mills declined, and Waco shrank. Today it is a small town of about five hundred residents, the kind of place that was briefly more important than its neighbors before the railroad economics shifted. The West Georgia Technical College now occupies a ninety-acre campus nearby, giving Waco a new reason to appear on a map.