Newnan's history, told through the places you can still visit

Newnan is two years away from its 200th birthday, and the city has started counting down. In October it opened Bicentennial Park on East Broad Street, the first piece of a celebration that will add an archway, murals and historic markers before 2028. It is a good moment to look at how much of the city's story you can still walk up to and touch.

Before the town, and its beginning

The land under Newnan was part of the Lower Muscogee, or Creek, Nation. In 1825 the Creek leader William McIntosh ceded it in the Treaty of Indian Springs, and that April he was executed under Muscogee law, which forbade leaders to give up land without the whole nation's consent. The state soon organized the territory into new counties. Coweta County took its name from the Coweta people of the Lower Creek.

The county's first seat was Bullsboro, a settlement about two miles east of today's downtown. In 1828 the seat moved to a new town named for General Daniel Newnan, a soldier who later served as Georgia's Secretary of State and in Congress, and Newnan was incorporated that year. Its founders laid it out on a grid, with a nine-block business district around a courthouse square and streets named for Jackson, Jefferson, Washington and Madison.

Cotton, the railroad and a war that passed it by

The passenger railroad arrived in 1851, and cotton money followed. R.D. Cole Manufacturing, founded as a sawmill in 1854, went on to build most of the houses put up in Newnan from the 1880s into the early 1900s, and the Newnan Cotton Mill opened beside the tracks on East Washington Street in 1888. By the city's account, Newnan was one of the wealthiest towns in the country for its size.

The railroad also made Newnan a Confederate hospital center. From 1863, about 10,000 soldiers were treated in seven field hospitals here, and the courthouse, churches and the College Temple school all took in wounded from both sides. In July 1864 Confederate cavalry under Joseph Wheeler defeated Union troops under Edward McCook at Brown's Mill, about three miles south of town. Newnan escaped the destruction that fell on much of Georgia, which is a large part of why so many of its antebellum houses still stand. Wheeler's headquarters during the battle, a house called Buena Vista on LaGrange Street, still stands.

Landmarks to visit

The Historic Coweta County Courthouse anchors the square. Built in 1904 in the Classical Revival style, it has a copper-covered dome about 100 feet tall and a four-faced clock, and it is open by appointment. A block away, the Carnegie Library on LaGrange Street opened in 1904 after a 17-year-old resident, Charles L. Thompson, wrote to Andrew Carnegie and won a $10,000 grant. The library believes it is the oldest surviving Carnegie library building in Georgia, and the city has restored it as a working library with a gallery for local exhibits.

The Newnan-Coweta Historical Society runs the McRitchie-Hollis Museum on Jackson Street, set in a 1937 house built for Ellis and Mildred Peniston and later used by Newnan Hospital before the society opened it as a museum. Guided tours cover the house and the society's exhibits on Newnan and Coweta County. The society also looks after the 1850s railroad depot on East Broad Street, now used for events and exhibitions, right beside the new Bicentennial Park.

In southeast Newnan, the Coweta County African American Heritage Museum and Research Center keeps artifacts, records and a genealogy workroom in a restored shotgun house on Farmer Street. It stands beside Farmer Street Cemetery, a 19th- and 20th-century burial ground for African Americans that the city began improving this year with an outdoor classroom, interpretive signs and a trail segment. The cemetery is part of the Chalk Level Historic District, which joined the National Register in January 2026 in recognition of the neighborhood African American families built during segregation.

South of town, Brown's Mill Battlefield Historic Site is free to visit, with trails and interpretive signs that walk you through the 1864 fight.

Traditions that carry the story

Some of Newnan's history is simply habit. Main Street Newnan's Market Day still fills the square on the first Saturday of each month from March through December, with musicians gathering on the courthouse lawn for Pickin' on the Square. Sprayberry's Barbecue on Jackson Street has served barbecue and Brunswick stew since 1926, when Houston Sprayberry turned his gas station into a restaurant; Alan Jackson waited tables there in high school. On North Court Square, Redneck Gourmet has served the square since 1991 from a building of about 1890 that began life as a bank and now carries a mural of Jackson outside.

December brings the city's Christmas Parade downtown on Saturday, December 12, at 6 p.m., and the historical society invites families to Cookies with Santa at the McRitchie-Hollis Museum on Sunday, December 6.

Where to learn more

Start at the McRitchie-Hollis Museum, whose society also runs a 3rd Thursday lecture series and is recording residents' memories for its Dial A Memory oral history project. The Coweta County Genealogical Society's research library on Carmichael Street and the heritage museum's genealogy workroom help with family history. For a self-guided walk, the city's historic districts page describes each of Newnan's districts; begin downtown and work outward, and keep an eye on Bicentennial Park as the markers go up.