During the first hundred years of Georgia's history, northwest Georgia was generally considered "Indian Country" and was bypassed by settlers going west.
Created primarily as an emergency measure, the original county served the temporary purpose of holding the territory together under Georgia's laws while the survey was being made and while a more permanent arrangement could be worked out for its disposition into counties of normal size. Therefore, at the legislative session on December 3, 1832, the original Cherokee was divided into ten counties: Cherokee, Cass (now Bartow), Cobb, Floyd, Forsyth, Gilmer, Lumpkin, Murray, Paulding, and Union. On December 24, 1832, the same legislature added a small tract of land that had been left over in the lower part of the original Cherokee to Campbell County. Divisions made later increased the number of counties made from the original to twenty-two and parts of two others.
Cherokee County's greatest asset has always been the people who chose to make the county their home. Some of the county's most outstanding native sons included two state governors, Joseph E. Brown and Joseph M. Brown, two Rhode Scholars, Eugene Booth and Dean Rusk (also former Secretary of State), the world famous golfer Bobby Jones, and Gospel Music Hall of Fame, Lee Roy Abernathy.
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