In the peak lynching era, from 1880 to 1930, this county had 20
lynchings, the third-highest number of any county in Georgia, which was the state with the highest number of lynchings in the country. All of the victims in Georgia were black, including at least 13 killed in the
May 1918 lynching rampage in this county, starting with the murders of Hayes Turner, and shortly after of his pregnant wife Mary Turner.
Native Americans and the Spanish Historic Native peoples occupying the area at the time of European encounter were the
Apalachee and the
Lower Creek. The first Europeans in what is now Brooks County were Spanish
missionaries from their colony in Florida, who arrived around 1570.
Early history The area that was to become Brooks County was first opened up to European-American settlement in 1818 when Irwin County was established.
Coffee Road was built through the region in the 1820s. Lowndes County's first court session was held at the tavern owned by Sion Hall on the Coffee Road, near what is now
Morven, Georgia in Brooks County.
Establishment Many residents of Lowndes County were unhappy when the
Atlantic and Gulf Railroad announced June 17, 1858, that they had selected a planned route that would bypass Troupville, the county seat. On June 22 at 3:00 am, the Lowndes County courthouse at
Troupville was set aflame by William B. Crawford, who fled to South Carolina after being released on bond. On August 9, a meeting convened in the academy building in Troupville, at which residents decided to divide Lowndes and create a new county to the west of the
Withlacoochee River, to be called Brooks County. On December 11, 1858, Brooks County was officially organized by the state legislature from parts of Lowndes and Thomas counties. It was named for
Preston Brooks, a member of Congress prior to the Civil War. He was very popular in the South because of his 1856
caning of abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and the citizens of Georgia wanted to honor him.
Brooksville, Florida, and
Brooksville, Virginia, also named or renamed themselves for Brooks. The county had been developed along the waterways for
cotton plantations, dependent on
enslaved laborers, many of whom were transported to the South in the
domestic slave trade during the
Antebellum years. Cotton brought a high return from local and international markets, making large planters wealthy. At the time of the
1860 federal census, Brooks County had a white population of 3,067, a
Free people of color population of 2, and a slave population of 3,282. The
Atlantic and Gulf Railroad reached
Quitman, the county seat, on October 23, 1860.
Civil War During the Civil War, the county was the main producer of food for the Confederacy; it became known as the "Smokehouse of the Confederacy." Some Confederate Army regiments were raised from the men of Brooks County. Plantation owners, county officials, and slave patrol members were exempt from military conscription, which caused some contention between the different economic classes in Brooks County. In August 1864, a local white man named John Vickery began plotting a
slave rebellion. His plan called for killing the slave owners, stealing what weapons they could find, setting fire to
Quitman, going to
Madison, Florida, burning the town, getting help from Union troops from the Gulf Coast, and then returning to Quitman. On the evening before the rebellion, a slave was arrested for theft and interrogated. Vickery was soon arrested as well. Vickery and four slave suspects were given a military trial by the local militia. Two Confederate deserters from Florida were also believed to have been involved, but were not caught by the time of the trial.
Post-Reconstruction and imposition of Jim Crow After the war, many
freedmen worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Following the war and the
Reconstruction era, Brooks County was one of the areas with a high rate of racial violence by whites against blacks. Its 20 deaths make it the county in Georgia that had the third-highest number of lynchings from 1870 to 1950. (From 1880 to 1930, Georgia had the highest number of such extrajudicial murders in the country). See, for example, the
Brooks County race war of 1894. In May 1918, at least 13 African Americans were killed during
a white manhunt and rampage after Sidney Johnson killed an abusive white planter. Johnson had been forced to work for the man under the state's abusive
convict lease system. Among those killed were Hayes Turner, and the next day his wife
Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant. They were the parents of two children. Mary Turner had condemned the mob's killing of her husband. She was abducted by the mob in Brooks County and brutally murdered at Folsom's Bridge on the Little River on the Lowndes County side; her unborn child was cut from her body and killed separately. During the next two weeks, at least another eleven blacks were killed by the mob. Johnson was killed in a shootout with police. As many as 500 African Americans fled Lowndes and Brooks counties to escape future violence. Mary Turner's lynching drew widespread condemnation nationally. It was a catalyst for the Anti-Lynching Crusaders campaign for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by
Leonidas Dyer of
St. Louis. It proposed to make lynching a federal crime, as southern states essentially never prosecuted the crimes. The Solid South Democratic block of white senators consistently defeated such legislation, aided by having
disenfranchised most black voters in the South. In 2010, a state historical marker, encaptioned "Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage," was installed at Folsom's Bridge in Lowndes County to commemorate these atrocities.
Modern history In the 21st century, Brooks County is classified as being in the Plantation Trace tourist region. ==Historical sites==