What county is macon in?
Macon (/ˈmeɪkən/ MAY-kən), officially Macon–Bibb County, is a consolidated city-county in Georgia, United States. Situated near the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, it is 85 miles (137 km) southeast of Atlanta and near the state’s geographic center — hence its nickname "The Heart of Georgia.”
Macon’s population was 157,346 in 2020.[2] It is the principal city of the Macon Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had 234,802 people in 2020.[3] It also is the largest city in the Macon–Warner Robins Combined Statistical Area (CSA), which had approximately 420,693 residents in 2017 and abuts the Atlanta metropolitan area to the northwest.
Voters approved the consolidation of the City of Macon and Bibb County governments in a 2012 referendum. Macon became the state’s fourth-largest city after Augusta when the merger occurred January 1, 2014.[6]
Macon is served by three interstate highways: I-16 (connecting to Savannah and coastal Georgia), I-75 (connecting to Atlanta to the north and Valdosta to the south), and I-475 (a city bypass highway). The area has two airports: Middle Georgia Regional Airport and Herbert Smart Downtown Airport.
The city has several institutions of higher education and numerous museums and tourism sites.
Macon was founded on the site of the Ocmulgee Old Fields, where the Creek Indians lived in the 18th century. Their predecessors, the Mississippian culture, built a powerful agriculture-based chiefdom (950–1100 AD). The Mississippian culture constructed earthwork mounds for ceremonial, religious, and burial purposes. Indigenous peoples inhabited the areas along the Southeast’s rivers for 13,000 years before Europeans arrived.[7]
Macon was developed at the site of Fort Benjamin Hawkins, built in 1809 at President Thomas Jefferson’s direction after he forced the Creek to cede their lands east of the Ocmulgee River (Archeological excavations in the 21st century found evidence of two separate fortifications.)[8] The fort was named for Benjamin Hawkins, who served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southeast territory south of the Ohio River for more than 20 years, had lived among the Creek, and was married to a Creek woman. Located at the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, the fort established a trading post with Native peoples at river’s most inland point navigable from the Low Country.
Fort Hawkins guarded the Lower Creek Pathway, an extensive and well-traveled American Indian network that the U.S. government later improved as the Federal Road, linking Washington, D.C., to the ports of Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana.[8] Used for trading with the Creek, the fort also was used by state militia and federal troops. It was a major military distribution point during the War of 1812 and the Creek War of 1813. After the wars, it was a trading post and garrisoned troops until 1821. Decommissioned around 1828, it later burned to the ground. A replica of the southeast blockhouse was built in 1938 and stands on an east Macon hill. Fort Hawkins Grammar School occupied part of the site. In the 21st century, archeological excavations have revealed more of the fort, increasing its historical significance, and led to further reconstruction planning for this major historical site.[8]
With the arrival of more settlers, Fort Hawkins was renamed "Newtown." After Bibb County's organization in 1822, the city was chartered as the county seat in 1823 and officially named Macon, in honor of Nathaniel Macon,[9] a statesman from North Carolina, where many early Georgia residents hailed. City planners envisioned "a city within a park" and created a city of spacious streets and landscapes. Over 250 acres (1.0 km2) were dedicated for Central City Park, and ordinances required residents to plant shade trees in their front yards.
Because of the beneficial local Black Belt geology and the use of enslaved Black laborers, cotton became the mainstay of Macon's early economy.[10] The city's location on the Ocmulgee River aided initial economic expansion, providing shipping access to new markets. Cotton steamboats, stagecoaches, and the 1843 arrival of the railroad increased marketing opportunities and contributed to Macon's economic prosperity.
Macon's growth had other benefits. In 1836, the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church chose Macon as the location for Wesleyan College, the first U.S. college to grant women college degrees.[11] Nonetheless, Macon came in last in the 1855 referendum voting to be Georgia's capital city with 3,802 votes.[12]
During the American Civil War, Macon served as the official arsenal of the Confederacy[10] manufacturing percussion caps, friction primers, and pressed bullets.[13] Camp Oglethorpe was established as a prison for captured Union officers and enlisted men. Later, it held only officers, at one time numbering 2,300. The camp was evacuated in 1864.[14]
Macon City Hall served as the temporary state capitol in 1864 and was converted to a hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers. The Union General William Tecumseh Sherman spared Macon on his march to the sea. His troops sacked the nearby state capital of Milledgeville, and Maconites prepared for an attack. Sherman, however, passed by without entering Macon.
The Macon Telegraph reported the city had furnished 23 companies of men for the Confederacy, but casualties were high. By war end, Maconite survivors fit for duty could only fill five companies.[15]
The city was taken by Union forces during Wilson's Raid on April 20, 1865.[16]
Because of its central location, Macon developed as a state transportation hub. In 1895, the New York Times dubbed Macon "The Central City” because of is emergence as a railroad transportation and textile factory hub.[17] Terminal Station was built in 1916.[18] In the twentieth century, Macon grew into a prospering town in Middle Georgia.
Macon has been impacted by natural catastrophes. In 1994 Tropical Storm Alberto made landfall in Florida and flooded several Georgia cities. Macon, which received 24 inches (61 cm) of rain, suffered major flooding in Georgia.[19]
On May 11, 2008, an EF2 tornado hit Macon. Touching down in nearby Lizella, the tornado moved northeast to the southern shore of Lake Tobesofkee, continued into Macon, and lifted near Dry Branch in Twiggs County. The storm’s total path length was 18 miles (29 km), and its path width was 100 yards (91 m).[citation needed] The tornado produced sporadic areas of major damage, with widespread straight-line wind damage along its southern track. The most significant damage was along Eisenhower Parkway and Pio Nono Avenue in Macon, where two businesses were destroyed and several others were heavily damaged. The tornado also impacted Middle Georgia State College, where almost half of the campus’s trees were snapped or uprooted and several buildings were damaged, with the gymnasium suffering the worst. The tornado’s intensity varied from EF0 to EF2, with the EF2 damage and winds up to 130 miles per hour (210 km/h) occurring near the intersection of Eisenhower Parkway and Pio Nono Avenue.
On July 31, 2012, voters in Macon (57.8 percent approval) and Bibb County (56.7 percent approval) passed a referendum to merge the governments of the city of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County. The vote came after the Georgia General Assembly passed House Bill 1171, authorizing the referendum earlier in the year;[6][20] Four previous consolidation attempts (in 1933, 1960, 1972, and 1976) failed.[21][22][23]
As a result of the referendum, (i) the Macon and Bibb County governments were replaced with a mayor and a nine-member county commission elected by districts and (ii) a portion of Macon extending into nearby Jones County was disincorporated. Robert Reichert was elected the first mayor of Macon-Bibb in the September 2013 election, which required a runoff with C. Jack Ellis in October.[24][25][26][27]
The Ocmulgee River is a major river that runs through the city. Macon is one of Georgia's three major Fall Line Cities, along with Augusta and Columbus. The Fall Line is where the hilly lands of the Piedmont plateau meet the flat terrain of the coastal plain. As such, Macon has a varied landscape of rolling hills on the north side and flat plains on the south. The fall line, where the altitude drops noticeably, causes rivers and creeks in the area to flow rapidly toward the ocean. In the past, Macon and other Fall Line cities had many textile mills powered by the rivers.
Macon is located at 32°50′05″N 83°39′06″W / 32.834839°N 83.651672°W / 32.834839; -83.651672 (32.834839, −83.651672).[58]
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 56.3 square miles (146 km2), of which 55.8 square miles (145 km2) is land and 0.5 square miles (1.3 km2) (0.82%) is water.
Macon is approximately 330 feet (100 m) above sea level.[5]
Macon has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification Cfa). The normal monthly mean temperature ranges from 46.3 °F (7.9 °C) in January to 81.8 °F (27.7 °C) in July. On average, there are 4.8 days with 100 °F (38 °C)+ highs,[a] 83 days with 90 °F (32 °C)+ highs,[b] and 43 days with a low at or below freezing; the average window for freezing temperatures is November 7 thru March 22, allowing a growing season of 228 days. The city has an average annual precipitation of 45.7 inches (1,160 mm). Snow is occasional, with about half of the winters receiving trace amounts or no snowfall, averaging 0.7 inches (1.8 cm); the snowiest winter was 1972−73 with 16.5 in (42 cm).[59][60][61]
Macon is the largest principal city in the Macon-Warner Robins-Fort Valley CSA, a Combined Statistical Area that includes the Macon metropolitan area (Bibb, Crawford, Jones, Monroe, and Twiggs counties) and the Warner Robins metropolitan area (Houston, Peach, and Pulaski counties) with a combined population of 411,898 in the 2010 census.[4]
As of the official 2010 U.S. Census,[4] the population of Macon was 91,351. In the last official census, in 2000, there were 97,255 people, 38,444 households, and 24,219 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,742.8 inhabitants per square mile (672.9/km2). There were 44,341 housing units at an average density of 794.6 per square mile (306.8/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 67.94% African American, 28.56% White, 0.02% Native American, 0.65% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.46% from other races, and 0.77% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 2.48% of the population.
There were 38,444 households, out of which 30.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 33.0% were married couples living together, 25.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 37.0% were non-families. 31.7% of all households were made up of individuals, and 12.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.44 and the average family size was 3.08.
In the city, the population was spread out, with 26.9% under the age of 18, 11.3% from 18 to 24, 27.5% from 25 to 44, 20.0% from 45 to 64, and 14.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females, there were 79.7 males. For every 100 females aged 18 and over, there were 72.8 males.
The 2010 Census listed Macon’s median household income as $28,366, below the state average of $49,347. The median family income was $37,268. Full-time working males had a median income of $34,163, higher than the $28,082 for females. The city’s per capita income was $17,010. About 24.1% of families and 30.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 43.6% of those under age 18 and 18.4% of those over 65.[66]
Malls include The Shoppes at River Crossing, Macon Mall, and Eisenhower Crossing. Traditional[clarification needed] shopping centers are in the downtown area and Ingleside Village.[67]
Macon is the headquarters of the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Georgia Army National Guard.
The largest single-site industrial complex in Georgia,[68] Robins Air Force Base, is 10 miles south of Macon on Highway 247, just east of Warner Robins.
Macon has been home for numerous musicians and composers, including Emmett Miller, The Allman Brothers Band, Randy Crawford, Mark Heard, Lucille Hegamin, Ben Johnston, Otis Redding, Little Richard, Mike Mills,[69] and Bill Berry of R.E.M., as well as more recent artists like violinist Robert McDuffie and country artist Jason Aldean.[clarification needed] Capricorn Records, run by Macon natives Phil Walden and briefly Alan Walden, made the city a Southern rock music production center in the late 1960s and 1970s.[70]
The Macon Symphony Orchestra,[71] a youth symphony, and the Middle Georgia Concert Band perform at the Grand Opera House in downtown Macon.[72]
The Georgia Music Hall of Fame was located in Macon from 1996 to 2011.[73]
Macon is home to the Mercer Bears, with NCAA Division I teams in soccer (men's and women's), football, baseball, basketball (men's and women's), tennis, and lacrosse. Central Georgia Technical College competes in men's and women's basketball. Wesleyan College, a women’s school, has basketball, soccer, cross country, tennis, softball, and volleyball teams.
The city maintains several parks and community centers.[84]
Prior to 2013, the city government consisted of a mayor and city council. Robert Reichert was elected the first mayor of the consolidated Macon-Bibb County in October 2013.[27] There are also 9 County Commissioners elected from districts within the county.[24]
On March 15, 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged the former County Manager, Dale M. Walker, with fraud.[86]
Bibb County Public School District operates district public schools.
Public high schools include:
Georgia Academy for the Blind, operated by the state of Georgia, is a statewide school for blind students.[92]
Also operated by Bibb County Public Schools:
Approximately 30,000 college students live in the greater Macon area.[99]
Macon has a substantial number of local television and radio stations. It is also served by two local papers.
In "Bart on the Road", the Season 7 episode of The Simpsons, character Nelson Muntz suggests the boys take a road trip to Macon. Later he reminds the group that none of their trouble would have happened had they chosen Macon over Knoxville, Tennessee.
In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Aunt Pittypat's coachman, Uncle Peter, protected her when she fled to Macon during Sherman's assault on Atlanta.
U.S. Senator Augustus Bacon, of Georgia, in his 1911 will, devised land in Macon in trust, to be used as a public park for the exclusive benefit of white people. The park, known as Baconsfield, was operated in that manner for many years.[100] In Evans v. Newton,[101] the Supreme Court of the United States held that the park could not continue to be operated on a racially discriminatory basis. The Supreme Court of Georgia thereupon declared “that the sole purpose for which the trust was created has become impossible of accomplishment” and remanded the case to the trial court, which held cy-près doctrine to be inapplicable, since the park's segregated character was an essential and inseparable part of Bacon's plan. The trial court ruled that the trust failed and that the property reverted to Bacon's heirs. The Supreme Court of Georgia[102] and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed.[103] The 50-acre (20 ha) park was lost and commercially developed.[104]
The city of Macon is visited in two different The Walking Dead spinoff games by Telltale Games: The Walking Dead: Season One and The Walking Dead: 400 Days.
In Season One, the city is portrayed as a small rural town and is visited by the main characters as they temporarily set up camp in the city. The city is the hometown of the game's main protagonist and the playable character throughout the game, Lee Everett. He and the other survivors barricade themselves inside his family's pharmacy as they are besieged by zombies. After one of the survivors dies, the group heads to a motel on the outskirts of Macon where they set up camp for two more episodes, before eventually deciding to leave the city for Savannah.
In 400 Days, the city is briefly shown in the episode "Vince's Story" as a flashback to when the episode's main character, Vince, fatally shoots an unseen and unnamed resident of the city before fleeing into the night before the apocalypse began. This murder would ultimately lead to Vince's arrest and the events that occurred at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.
Interstates:
U.S. Routes:
State Routes:
The Macon Transit Authority (MTA) is Macon's public-transit system, operating the Public Transit City Bus System throughout Macon-Bibb County. As of 2022, the MTA has a total of 10 city bus routes, operating out of the Terminal Station hub.[109]
Greyhound Lines provides intercity bus service. In 2019, they moved from a stand-alone bus station to the Terminal Station to be in the same hub as the local mass transit busses.[110]
Macon grew as a center of rail transport after the 1846 opening of the Macon and Western Railroad.[111] Two of the most note-worthy train companies operating through the city were the Central of Georgia Railway and the Southern Railway. The city continued to be served by passenger trains at Terminal Station until 1971. The Frisco Railroad's Kansas City–Florida Special served the city until 1964.[112] The Southern's Royal Palm ran from Cincinnati, through Macon, to Miami, Florida until 1966. (A truncated route served to Valdosta, Georgia until 1970.) The Central of Georgia's Nancy Hanks ran through Macon, from Atlanta to Savannah until 1971. Since at least 2006 Macon has been included in the proposed Georgia Rail Passenger Program to restore inter-city rail service but as of 2020, Georgia lacks any inter-city passenger rail service other than the federally funded inter-state Amtrak services. In 2022, Amtrak announced a new fifteen year plan to expand its services, which Macon was included in.[113]
Macon has six sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International, Inc. (SCI):[114]
Named for North Carolina statesman and U.S.senator Nathaniel Macon, the city was established at the point where the Upper Coastal Plain rises to join the Piedmont, above which the Ocmulgee River is no longer navigable. That location makes it one of the South’s fall-line cities. While river transport was eventually replaced by rail, which a century later took a backseat to the intersection of two interstate highways, Macon’s location at the heart of Georgia’s transportation corridors has shaped its course even more than its mild climate and ample water resources have.
As the commercial hub of a productive agricultural region, the city’s fortunes were tied to a southern cotton culture that brought substantial wealth, war, and subsequently genteel poverty for its first 100-plus years. Not until the infusion of people and monies that began with military preparations for World War II (1941-45) was the stage set for a stronger, more diversified economy. Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins (sixteen miles south of Macon), the largest industrial complex in the state, drives the region’s ongoing growth.
The land that became Macon/Bibb County was Indian Territory until 1821, nearly as pristine and undeveloped as Hernando de Soto found it when he rode through in 1540. Land-hungry Americans were eager to plow it into cotton fields. In 1821, demoralized by their defeat at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Creek Indians finally relinquished the area between the Ocmulgee and Flint rivers, as well as the Ocmulgee Old Fields, which had been withheld from the 1805 cession. Shortly thereafter the state legislature began carving the new land into counties and authorized the laying out of a town on the Ocmulgee’s west bank.
With dozens of families already living around Fort Benjamin Hawkins, the 1806 frontier outpost on the east bank that had served as post office, trading “factory,” and military supplies distribution point for more than a decade, there was no shortage of bidders when the lots were put up for auction. Building began immediately, and the town was incorporated on December 8, 1823. Farmland in the surrounding countryside, distributed by lottery, was also quickly taken: ten years later the city boasted more than 3,000 “industrious and enterprising” inhabitants who had flocked to the area from New England, New York, and North Carolina; Bibb County had more than twice that number. Cotton was selling at twelve to sixteen cents a pound, and 69,000 bags of cotton were poled down the Ocmulgee River to Darien; there were three new banks with capital of $1 million, and merchandise in stores was estimated at like value. Farmers came to Macon from more than sixty miles around to do business, and money was plentiful.
As spreading cultivation lessened rainwater runoff, however, the Ocmulgee River narrowed, and navigation soon proved impossible without constant dredging. Realizing that rail offered the best protection for their mercantile interests, Macon entrepreneurs convened a statewide meeting that led to the legislature’s decision to build track from the Chattahoochee River to Chattanooga, Tennessee—extending the reach of the Monroe Railroad they had previously launched. The same men also convinced the city of Macon to buy 2,500 shares of stock in the Central Railroad, so as to connect Macon to Savannah. Other railroads followed, and by 1860 Macon had secured its place as the intrastate center of Georgia’s 1,400 miles of track. (Atlanta’s superior connection to interstate transport was an unforeseen consequence.)
Commerce remained the backbone of Macon’s economy, but by 1860 manufacturing had gained a foothold: there were several foundries, brickyards, and tellingly, a cotton mill. Its population having grown to 8,132 (15,952 in the county), Macon was the fifth largest city in the state. Real estate was valued at $4,717,551, and personal property (most of it in enslaved laborers) at $10,279,574.
While some of Macon’s most influential citizens held Unionist views, news of South Carolina’s secession from the Union in December 1860 was nevertheless greeted with yells of excitement, firing guns, ringing bells, and a torchlight procession through town; preparations for defense began immediately. Macon-area military action during the Civil War (1861-65), however, was limited to an unsuccessful if dramatic 1864 assault from the east by an inept Yankee general bent on freeing Union prisoners while Union general William T. Sherman attacked Atlanta (just one stray cannonball fell inside the city limits).
Accordingly, Macon’s relative safety encouraged thousands of people from the surrounding countryside to take refuge in the city. Macon served the Confederate cause in multiple ways: it was a depository for Confederate gold, and its arsenal, laboratory, and armory manufactured tons of needed ordnance. Macon’s Camp Oglethorpe held prisoners of war who were officers, and many of its buildings became hospitals for wounded soldiers arriving by rail from battlefields to the north. When news of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, arrived in Macon, General Howell Cobb’s prompt and cooperative surrender ensured that the Union troops occupied the city without destroying it.
Losses from the war were more than military and political. In 1870 real estate values were comparable to what they had been ten years earlier, but personal property—reflecting emancipation—totaled only $2,697,590, a drop of 74 percent. More painful, there were 487 new widows and 913 new orphans in the city. Reconstruction saw Blacks in new roles as aldermen, legislators, postmasters, and congressmen, but that revolution was, to use W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase, “a splendid failure” and did not last. Having won their freedom, the freedpeople soon found themselves newly tied to the land by sharecropping and tenancy systems; that, coupled with agriculture’s continued dependence on cotton, kept regional per capita income low until the boll weevil brought it even lower after World War I (1917-18). Like the rest of the South, Macon did not have the capital to develop its resources.
Still, the city managed to acquire the trappings of modern urban life: an expanded water system, sanitary sewers, telephones, electricity, streetcars, paved sidewalks, and over many years, paved streets. The Board of Public Education was established, Central City Park was developed, a city hospital opened in a former school, and a public library was organized. New citizens emigrated from outlying areas and other southern states, and the city increased its size by annexing Vineville, Hugenin Heights, Cherokee Heights, and East and South Macon. The Bibb Manufacturing Company, organized in 1876, dominated the local economy with multiple textile plants and mill villages, but the newly bred “Elberta” peach and refrigerated railroad cars brought the peach industry to life, and the organization of new banks and railroads enhanced business activity.
Macon’s active volunteer militias had joined the battle every time the United States took up arms, even (despite lingering animosities from the recent fight with the Union) the Spanish-American War (1898) and raid into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa. Soldiers had trained at camps in Macon; thus it was natural, when America’s entry into World War I became obvious, for Macon Chamber of Commerce leaders to aggressively seek military training facilities. Their efforts succeeded in bringing tens of thousands of “Doughboys” and a significant monthly payroll to Camp Wheeler, just east of Macon at Holly Bluff in 1917, and the community’s hospitable embrace of the soldiers paved the way for the camp’s reactivation in World War II (1941-45). (The Ocmulgee East Industrial Park and Macon’s Downtown Airport are now located on its site.) But World War II brought additional installations: a naval ordnance plant, a training center for British Royal Air Force pilots at Cochran Field, and most important, with the help of Congressman Carl Vinson, the enormous Robins Air Force Base for which Maconites purchased 3,108 acres in adjacent Houston County to give to the U.S. Department of Defense.
The long-term impact of these facilities, especially Robins, cannot be overestimated. They led to industrial and demographic changes that, in conjunction with social and technological changes, altered local culture in ways that continue to reverberate. If Macon had ever been, as it was once described, “more interested in the graces and pleasures of reciprocal hospitality than in commercial enterprises,” the phrase was no longer apt. The postwar boom saw northern firms establish so many new plants (to capitalize on such local resources as pulpwood, kaolin, and tobacco) that industrial employment soared from 6,500 in 1940 to 16,000 in 1949. Additionally, cotton’s grip on agriculture loosened as farmers began raising poultry, peanuts, and soybeans, and farms became larger as mechanization and migration to jobs in cities eroded the destructive tenancy system.
With non-southerners and Blacks moving into the city, and growing numbers of whites moving into adjacent counties, Macon’s social homogeneity gave way to greater diversity, a process that was significantly accelerated by the civil rights movement. The city managed to end de jure segregation without bloodshed or property damage. The burgeoning contemporary music scene may have helped to facilitate these changes; white youths broke racial barriers by attending City Auditorium concerts by homegrown Black artists Little Richard, Otis Redding, and James Brown in the 1960s. Such cultural crossover laid the groundwork for the Macon–Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau’s twenty-first century community brand: “Soul Lives Here.”
Just as Macon leaders had pushed for railroads in the nineteenth century, they sought good highway connections in the twentieth: the juncture of Interstates 75 and 16 in the 1960s, the Fall Line Freeway in the 1990s. Other infrastructure needs were not neglected. In recent decades, voters have also approved local measures to support road-improvement and local schools as well as a water treatment plant and reservoir.
The end of the twentieth century saw Macon’s economic focus shift from agriculture and industry to retail and service, with health care, financial and insurance employment, and tourism becoming increasingly important. A regional mall opened in West Macon in 1975, reorienting retail activity from downtown to the Eisenhower Parkway; The Macon Mall expanded thereafter, eventually enclosing thirty acres, before it entered a steep decline in the twenty-first century. In 2021 the mall was deeded to the local government and slated for redevelopment. The Atrium Health Navicent Medical Center (formerly the Medical Center of Central Georgia), founded in 1895, is one of four Level One trauma centers in the state and is ranked one of the 100 top-performing hospitals in the country. Nearly 10,000 people work in white-collar jobs at insurance and financial firms.
In 2012 residents in Macon and Bibb County voted to consolidate city and county governments. The newly constituted Macon-Bibb County, which features a mayor and ten person board of commissioners, took effect in 2014. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Macon-Bibb County had a population of 157,346.
The annual Cherry Blossom Festival draws throngs during March, when more than 200,000 trees are in bloom, and the Ocmulgee Mounds, now part of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, which was established in the 1930s to preserve and interpret the mounds, has been joined by more than a dozen museums and historic houses in offering year-round programs for visitors. A host of performing arts activities gives Maconites opportunities to enjoy dance, theater, and musical performances (including its own symphony) in a variety of venues. And in a swing back to the city’s roots, the revitalization of downtown led by an energetic civic effort has opened access to the Ocmulgee River via a park and greenway.
As might be expected in a more democratic era, leadership in Macon no longer rests with the business elite or elected officials; numerous citizens groups, organized and ad hoc, make their voices heard on community issues.
General Sherman passed to the east of Macon on his way to Savannah, sparing the city from the destruction that Union soldiers caused on their march to the sea. The pace of economic activity in Macon frequently meant adapting rather than replacing structures as patterns of commerce and living changed; as a result the city has an extensive inventory of fine old buildings, many of great historic and/or architectural significance. As of 2023, fifteen historic districts, containing more than 6,000 structures, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two homes, the Hay House (open to the public) and the Raines-Carmichael House (private) are National Historic Landmarks.
Antebellum cotton wealth is still visible in what writer Bret Harte described in 1874 as “lordly houses of the great slave-owners” in the Intown and Vineville historic districts, which provide a sharp contrast to the simple frame “shotgun” houses occupied by Blacks in nearby Pleasant Hill. Greek revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne predominate, but there are many other architectural styles as well. Macon’s commercial history is written in brick and stone upon its mercantile buildings downtown. Its devotion to religious expression can be seen in the Gothic, neo-Gothic, Romanesque, and even Byzantine-influenced houses of worship located in all sections of the city.
It has been said that Macon has more churches per capita than any other city in the South; clearly, religious life has been an important part of the community from its earliest years, exerting both spiritual and political influence. The Episcopalians were the first denomination to organize (1825), joined shortly by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians (1826), which entities continue in existence as Christ Church (Episcopal), First Baptist on High Street, Mulberry Methodist, and First Presbyterian. Other faiths followed: Catholics in the 1830s, Jews in the 1840s, the Christian denomination in the 1880s, Christian Scientists in the 1890s, and by the turn of the century, Adventists, Theosophists, Free Methodists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Nazarenes, and Free Will and Primitive Baptists.
In the late twentieth century came Evangelicals, Church of God, Holiness, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, Mormons, Muslims, and Baha’i. African Americans worshiped in their enslavers’ churches during slavery but broke into separate congregations after the Civil War and now represent numerous denominations, many of which are independent. Of the more than 250 congregations in Macon, by far the greatest number has been Baptist, with Methodist a distant second, but increasing numbers are non- or interdenominational.
People who seek their fortunes in frontier towns may have a particular interest in improving the next generation; for whatever reason Macon embarked on a substantial number of educational ventures that have left significant marks on the city.
One of the earliest was the desire to establish a college “to burst the shackles of ignorance and superstition which had bound woman for three thousand years.” A group of citizens pledged $9,000 to purchase five acres on a “commanding eminence” halfway between downtown and Vineville and offered it to the Methodist Conference, which obtained a legislative charter in 1836. Thus did Wesleyan College become the first college in the United States chartered to grant degrees to women. The liberal arts school moved to a 200-acre campus in the town of Rivoli, six miles northwest of the original site, in 1928; its conservatory of music, a program close to the community’s heart, remained on Macon’s College Street until early 1953.
In 1852 subscriptions were raised to launch a school to educate blind children, after which the state was petitioned to charter and endow what continues to be the Georgia Academy for the Blind. A Negro Division, opened in 1882, was integrated into the Vineville branch in 1965, at which time the mission was expanded to include training for multidisabled children. The only residential school for the visually impaired in Georgia, the academy receives funds from the state and federal governments.
Other institutions founded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries no longer exist but illustrate the trend: an eclectic medical college located in Macon in midcentury is credited with graduating Georgia’s first female doctor before moving to Atlanta in 1881. Pio Nono College, named for Pope Pius the Ninth, was founded by the Catholic Church in 1874 but became St. Stanislaus in 1889 when Jesuits acquired the school to train initiates for the Jesuit priesthood; it burned in 1921 and was never rebuilt.
The Georgia-Alabama Business College was established in 1889, graduating tens of thousands of stenographers, secretaries, bookkeepers, auditors, accountants, and linotype operators during its sixty-year life. Central City College was organized by the Missionary Baptist denomination in 1899 on 235 acres in east Macon, providing the only academic higher education for Blacks in Macon throughout its existence. Destroyed by fire in 1921, the college was rebuilt and continued until the 1950s, when, known at the time as Georgia Baptist College, it closed due to financial problems. Minnie L. Smith used her own financial resources to open Beda-Etta College in 1921, erecting a three-story brick building in Pleasant Hill; its course of study was primarily business and commercial.
After the Civil War, the city competed with other Georgia towns to convince Mercer University, a Baptist school founded as Mercer Institute in 1833, to move from Penfield to Macon, offering six acres west of Tattnall Square Park and $125,000 in municipal bonds. The bid was accepted, and classes began in Macon in 1871. Mercer University is the second largest Baptist-affiliated institution in the world, with a campus in Atlanta in addition to the one in Macon, and the only university of its size to offer programs in liberal arts, business, education, engineering, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and theology. The medical and engineering schools have had a particular impact on the local economy, supplying doctors to rural Georgia while reinforcing Macon’s role as a regional medical center and providing engineers for the “Aerospace Alley” industries drawn by Robins Air Force Base.
Central Georgia Technical College was founded as Macon Area Vocational-Technical School by the Bibb Board of Education in 1962 and later became part of the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education (later the Technical College System of Georgia). Central Georgia Tech offers technical studies designed to meet the needs of employers in the eleven-county area that the school serves.
Macon leaders had sought a unit of the University System of Georgia for half a century before succeeding, via a bond issue, in opening Macon State College in 1968. Originally a two-year community college, the school grew rapidly while serving a part-time commuter student body, many of whom went on to attend a four-year institution within the University System. In 1997 the college was authorized to offer a number of critically needed four-year programs. In 2013 the school merged with Middle Georgia College to form Middle Georgia State College (later Middle Georgia State University).
Macon has a variety of historical attractions. Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, site of a number of mysterious mounds on the east side of the river, traces 10,000 years of Native American occupation of the Macon Plateau. The Museum of Arts and Sciences presents planetarium shows and exhibitions in art, science, and the humanities. The Tubman African American Museum is devoted to interpreting African American art, culture, and history. The Georgia Sports Hall of Fame offers interactive exhibitions illustrating the history of sport in the state and honoring exceptional Georgia athletes, and the Georgia Children’s Museum offers interactive exhibitions and programs, including theatrical productions, summer camp, and a television studio. The Georgia Music Hall of Fame museum operated in downtown Macon from 1996 until 2011.
Several house museums provide glimpses of Macon’s architectural and cultural past: the Cannonball House and Museum on Mulberry Street, the only Macon home damaged during the brief 1864 assault on the city, interprets the Civil War; the Hay House on Georgia Avenue, an elaborate 1855 Italianate villa remarkable for having been among the first homes in the country to incorporate indoor plumbing and central heat, also houses notable art and furnishings. Mercer University’s Woodruff House, an 1836 Greek revival–style mansion atop Coleman Hill, is open during festivals and special events.
Just fifteen minutes north of the city in Jones County, the Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site (ca. 1840s) illustrates a medium-sized Georgia cotton plantation turned family farm. The 35,000-acre Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge is ten minutes northeast of Jarrell; it offers extensive nature trails, a wildlife drive, fishing ponds, and interactive natural history displays in its visitors’ center. The Piedmont staff also administers the 6,500-acre Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Bibb County.
Thirty minutes south of Macon the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base features more than ninety aircraft and exhibitions that span a century of flight.
Macon has two active community theaters. Macon Little Theater, founded in the 1930s, and Theatre Macon, established in the 1980s, offer full seasons of theatrical productions, as well as youth companies. The Macon Symphony also presents a full season and sponsors numerous outreach activities. A number of other venues offer additional cultural programming: the late-nineteenth-century Grand Opera House, restored in the 1970s, seats more than 1,000; the 400-seat Douglass Theatre, established by African American entrepreneur Charles Douglass in the 1920s and restored in the 1990s, has 70mm film capability; the Macon Centreplex, consisting of the 9,252-seat Macon Coliseum, the 2,688-seat City Auditorium (with reportedly the largest copper dome in the world), and the Edgar H. Wilson Convention Center, is the state’s largest convention complex outside of metropolitan Atlanta.
Description Bibb County is located in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, its population was 157,346. Bibb County is geographically located in the Central Georgia region, and is the largest county in the Macon metropolitan area. Wikipedia
