1800 to 1825

With a series of treaties, Creek territory shifted west a river basin at a time in Georgia. The 1805 Treaty of Washington with the Creeks exchanged annual payments for the extension of the state boundary from the Oconee River to the Ocmulgee. Except for a three-by-five mile reserve in the Ocmulgee Old Fields, the Creek Nation and territories now lay west of the Ocmulgee River.

Benjamin Hawkins, a compatriot of George Washington, served as Agent for Indian Affairs south of the Ohio River. In 1806, for Creek influence, trade, and a safe haven, Hawkins was authorized to build an American frontier fort on a hill overlooking the river near the ancient mounds . Named in Hawkins honor, the fort was garrisoned by soldiers. But soon trappers, traders, missionaries, and pioneer families followed the Federal Road west from Augusta to Fort Hawkins. The growing village between Fort Hawkins and the river was called “NewTown.”

In the War of 1812, also known as the Second War for Independence, some upper Creek tribes favored the British, while many lower Creeks allied with the United States. In 1814 twenty-five hundred militiamen assembled at Fort Hawkins to march to Mobile. Brigadier General William McIntosh, also a prominent chief of the Lower Creek Federation, commanded the troops. When word reached Fort Hawkins of General Andrew Jackson’s American victory at New Orleans, soldiers and townspeople celebrated with a nineteen-gun salute.

William McIntosh was the grandson of John McIntosh, a Scots Highlander who came from Britain with Oglethorpe. His father was William and his mother Sejoyah of the Wind Clan, an important Lower Creek family. The young William embodied a clash of cultures. Fighting with Lower Creeks alongside Andrew Jackson against the Upper Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, he earned a commission in the United States Army. As chief of the Lower Creek Federation, McIntosh attempted to negotiate settlements between Creeks and Cherokees and modeled Creek assimilation within Georgia.

McIntosh supported the “Indian Springs Session” that sold five million acres between the Ocmulgee and Flint Rivers in 1821, as well as the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825 signed on his property upriver, which allowed the sale of most of the final parcels of Creek lands in Georgia. In revenge a band of Upper Creeks killed him. Even so, within a few years, the Creeks were relocated from their lands east of the Mississippi River to Oklahoma, where the Muscogee reside today.

No longer occupying the lands along the Ocmulgee at the fall line, the Muscogee are an indelible part of Ocmulgee Heritage. Today McIntosh’s plantation at Indian Springs is reported to be the first state park established in the nation. An old verse reminds us, “That mid the forest where they roamed, there rings no hunter’s shout; but their name is on your waters, and ye cannot wash it out.”

By the time Fort Hawkins was decommissioned in 1818, the area had attracted homesteaders in such large numbers that Jones County, of which NewTown was a part, was said to be the most populous in the state. NewTown, Macon’s precursor, consisted of homes, a post office, stores, a cotton warehouse, and an active riverboat service. In one of the first editorials of The Messenger,Fort Hawkins/NewTown’s newspaper, Simri Rose scolded those who had the habit of bathing near the ferry: “Ladies of respectability …have been under necessity, waiting an hour or two for persons bathing to come out and dress.”³

With Creek land cessions between the Ocmulgee and the Flint River, inhabitants of NewTown looked across the river to the west bank for the aspiring settlement’s growth. Bibb County, carved out of several counties in 1822, was named for William Wyatt Bibb, the territorial governor and later the first governor of Alabama. Bibb County’s seat was named for Nathaniel Macon, a Carolina Revolutionary War hero and statesman.

Macon did not grow haphazardly like NewTown across the river. Inspired by the natural beauty and the ancient city of Babylon, James Webb, Macon’s first urban planner, staked the new city in 1823. With streets named after native trees and boulevards wider than L’Enfant’s Washington DC, the groundwork was laid for a “city in a park.”

Shopkeepers, planters, traders, and boaters snatched up the new lots along the west banks of the Ocmulgee. The Messenger reported that since March of 1823, the month of the first auction, 116 workmen were building the city of Macon. “This looks as much like a city in a wilderness as we have ever seen.” ⁴

The poor but proud frontier farmers, known as “crackers” for the sound of their whips driving mules or oxen-laden wagons to market, had some say in the design of the new city. “Gun-toting” Piedmont farmers, seeking the most direct route to the river, pushed their teams through the engineer’s stakes. Still today, Cotton Avenue slices through Webb’s linear parks and city blocks to the river.

There was much to celebrate on the Fourth of July in 1823, the young country’s birthday. The celebration was held on both sides of the river. There were patriotic speeches at NewTown and a barbecue, thirteen toasts, and a salute with guns on the new public square in Macon.

Some Americans, however, watched the Independence Day celebration from a distance. Although the Georgia colony had forbidden slavery, by the time Macon was founded in 1823, it was an entrenched part of agricultural life. There were Americans of African ancestry who enjoyed frontier freedom as trappers and traders, as well as “free persons of color,” such as wealthy businessman Solomon Humphries, but these were exceptions.

Though most farmers did not have slaves, upon middle Georgia’s large farms or plantations, slavery supported a powerful agriculture system known as “King Cotton.” The king’s reign and the institution of slavery lasted a generation in Macon before ending with the Civil War.