Pre-history Woodland Indians and
Creek Nation initially held the area of present-day Dalton, Georgia. The first recorded white man in the area was Spanish explorer
Hernando de Soto (1540). By the mid-18th century, when the
Cherokee forced the Creek Nation out of their homelands, to the west and south, the Cherokee Indians called the mountains of north Georgia their "Enchanted Land" until their own forced removal in 1838.
Industrialization By the time the last Cherokees were removed from the land, work was underway for a railroad, the
Western and Atlantic Railroad (W&A), to join the
Tennessee River with the
Georgia Railroad then under construction. In 1847, Dalton was defined as a mile radius from the city center, the Western and Atlantic Depot. The final segment of this pivotal railway was completed in Tunnel Hill, Whitfield County in 1850. A second railroad, East Tennessee and Georgia, was completed in 1852. Catherine Evans Whitener's revitalization of the pre-Civil War-era craft of candlewicking gave rise to a cottage chenille bedspread industry. Homes along U.S. Highway 41 displayed brightly patterned homemade bedspreads on front yard clotheslines in hopes of luring tourists into a purchase. The stretch of highway passing through Whitfield County became known colloquially as "Peacock Alley" in reference to one of the most common patterns depicted on the bedspreads. The bedspread business boomed to a multimillion-dollar industry by the 1950s, and from this early origin, the carpet tufting industry grew in Dalton after Glenn Looper developed an adaptation that allowed the mechanism used to tuft yarn into muslin or cotton for bedspreads to tuft into jute, shifting the nation's carpet manufacturers from woven wool products in the northeast to tufted synthetic carpets in northwest Georgia. Today, carpet mills remain the region's major employers and economic drivers. Dalton was named for
Edward Dalton White.
Civil War During the Civil War, the city of Dalton saw its first action during the
Great Locomotive Chase, on April 12, 1862. More than a year later, on September 18–20, 1863, massive Union and Confederate forces battled a few miles west of Dalton at the
Battle of Chickamauga, and later during the
Chattanooga campaign. The war came to
Whitfield County at the
First Battle of Dalton, a series of skirmishes between February 22 and February 27, 1864, during which Union
Major General George H. Thomas probed Confederate
General Joseph E. Johnston's
Army of Tennessee to determine if the loss of two full divisions to reinforce Confederate forces elsewhere had made the Army of Tennessee vulnerable to Union attack. Johnston's forces held and Thomas withdrew to Chattanooga. At the beginning of the
Atlanta campaign, the
Battle of Rocky Face Ridge and Dug Gap began on May 7, 1864, and ended when Johnston completed the withdrawal of his forces from Dalton on May 12. The
Second Battle of Dalton occurred during the Atlanta campaign on August 14–15, 1864. In
John Bell Hood's Tennessee campaign, soldiers of Major General
Samuel G. French's Division of Lieutenant General
Alexander Stewart's Corps of the Confederate Army of Tennessee
attacked a Union blockhouse in Tilton before passing through Dalton and heading west. The U.S. government recently declared Dalton and Whitfield County to have more intact Civil War artifacts than any other place in the country. Also of interest is the site of the historic
Western & Atlantic Railroad Station; one of the few still standing and restored to its original architectural state, this site used to be the location of the Dalton Depot Restaurant (closed since 2015). The steel center marker for the original surveying of the city of Dalton is still inside the depot.
Modern history The
A. D. Strickland Store was once a rural county store, built , and is now part of the
National Register of Historic Places. The
Bohannon Gang was arrested in Dalton on August 27, 1897. The gang of "car thieves" were believed to have been robbing area cargo trains for about a decade before their capture, and were accused of over $100,000 in cargo theft, now over $3.7 million today. Led by
Hiram Walter Bohannon, the gang's trial was quickly followed by the "merchant's trials" in which many Dalton area businessmen were accused and convicted of receiving stolen goods. The trial was widely publicized and even appeared in the October 24, 1897, issue of
The New York Times. The ring leaders were sentenced to the Cole City Convict Camp, in Cole City, Georgia. The last to be released was Hiram Walter Bohannon, in 1903, after receiving a pardon from
Joseph M. Terrell. ==Carpet industry==