Hardwood Floor Refinishing Near Me in Madison, Ga

Madison is a city in Morgan County, Georgia, United States. It is share of the Atlanta-Athens-Clarke-Sandy Springs combine statistical area. The population was 4,447 at the 2020 census, up from 3,979 in 2010. The city is the county seat of Morgan County and the site of the Morgan County Courthouse.

The Madison Historic District is one of the largest in the state. Many of the approximately 100 antebellum homes have been with intent restored. Bonar Hall is one of the first of the grand-style Federal homes built in Madison during the town's cotton-boom heyday from 1840 to 1860.

Budget Travel magazine voted Madison as one of the world's 16 most picturesque villages.

Madison is featured upon Georgia's Antebellum Trail, and is designated as one of the state's Historic Heartland cities.

On December 12, 1809, the town, named for 4th United States president, James Madison, was incorporated. Madison was described in an before 19th-century event of White's Statistics of Georgia as "the most cultured and aristocratic town on the stagecoach route from Charleston to New Orleans." An 1849 edition of White's Statistics stated, "In narrowing of intelligence, refinement, and hospitality, this town acknowledges no superior."

While many take that William Tecumseh Sherman spared the town because it was too beautiful to burn during his March to the Sea, the resolved is that Madison was home to pro-Union Congressman (later Senator) Joshua Hill. Hill had ties past General Sherman's brother in the House of Representatives, so his sparing the town was more embassy than admission of its beauty.

In 1895 Madison was reported to have an oil mill as soon as a capital of $35,000, a soap factory, a fertilizer factory, four steam ginneries, a mammoth compress, two carriage factories, a furniture factory, a grist and flouringmill, a bottling works, a distillery when a skill of 120 gallons a day, an ice factory in the declare of a capital of $10,500, a canning factory later a capital of $10,000, a bank past a capital of $75,000, surplus $12,000, and a number of small industries operated by individual enterprise. One of the carriage factories was owned and operated by prominent African-American businessman and pioneer H. R. Goldwire.

Against the backdrop of this Jim Crow-era prosperity, white Madisonians participated in at least three documented lynchings of African Americans. In February 1890, after a brusque trial involving knife-wielding jurors, Brown Washington, a 15-year-old, was found guilty of the murder of a 9-year-old local white girl. After the verdict, though the sheriff similar to the governor's hail called in the works the Madison Home Guard to protect Washington, "only three militiamen and none of the officers" responded to the order. Washington was for that reason easily taken from jail by a posse of ten men organized by a "leading local businessman". Described as "among the best citizens", they promptly handed him higher than to a mob of on top of 300 people waiting external the courthouse. From there, he was taken to a telegraph pole behind a local residence, allowed a prayer, then strung happening and shot, his body mutilated by on peak of 100 bullets. Afterwards, in the patriarchal exhibition-style common of southern lynchings, a sign was posted on the telegraph pole: "Our women and kids will be protected." His body was not taken down until noon the neighboring day.

According to Brundage's account of the lynching of Brown Washington in Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930:

In the aftermath, though local and confess authorities vowed to thoroughly investigate the lynching as competently as the Madison Home Guard's dereliction of duty, just a week higher a grand jury was advised by a judge of the unconventional court of Madison that any chemical analysis would be a waste of time. In addition, the acknowledge body charged bearing in mind investigating the house guard's non-response reported that their absence had been satisfactorily explained and no tribunal would be convened to dissect the matter."

Although the local Madisonian newspaper bungled to report on the 1890 extra-judicial murder of Mr. Washington, an even earlier first lynching by Madisonians of a man they similarly pulled out of the old rock county jail appears in the contemporary accounts from the Atlanta Constitution.

In 1919, ten years after the erection of a Confederate memorial one block from the newly built Morgan County courthouse, another lynching occurred in the dark of night a few days before Thanksgiving. This time, citizens skipped the show-trials altogether, opting to travel to the home of Mr. Wallace Baynes in what one paper of the hours of daylight called an "arresting party", though no charges against Mr. Baynes were stipulated in the news account. Baynes shot at the party, striking Mr. Frank F. Ozburn of Madison in the head, killing him instantly. In response, the mob outside his house grew to 40-50 men. Despite the arrival of Madison Sheriff C.S. Baldwin, Mr. Baynes was pulled from his house by a rope and shot near the Little River. Afterwards, the sheriff present at the lynching said he could not identify any of the men who came for Mr. Baynes, despite the fact that they arrived in cars and lit occurring Mr. Baynes' home considering the headlights of their vehicles. In an editorial that argued that mobs in the South were no worse than mobs in the North yet condemned complex lynchings, the local Madisonian claimed: "There is not now and perhaps will never be, any friction together with the races here."

The Confederate monument erected in 1909 by the Morgan County Daughters of the Confederacy one block from the courthouse where Mr. Baynes was not afforded a trial was inscribed in part: "NO NATION ROSE/SO WHITE AND FAIR, NONE FELL SO PURE OF CRIME." In the 1950s, the monument was moved to Hill Park, a Madison city property donated by Bell Hill Knight, daughter of Joshua Hill, the aforementioned pro-Union senator who in the past the Civil War resigned his slope rather than Keep secession. Mrs. Knight, whose husband Captain Gazaway Knight was Commander of the Panola Guards, a Confederate brigade that was organized in Madison, was a staunch zealot of the Morgan County Daughters of the Confederacy.

Madison has one of the largest historic districts in the make a clean breast of Georgia, with visitors coming to see the antebellum architecture of the homes. Allie Carroll Hart was instrumental in establishing Madison's historical prestige.

According to the Madison Historic Preservation Commission, "The Madison Historic District is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is Madison's foremost tourist attraction. Preservation of the district and of each property within its boundary provides for the support of Madison's unique historic mood and environment environment. Madison's preservation efforts reflect a nationwide goings-on to maintain a 'sense of place' amid generic advocate development." The Historic Preservation Commission, appointed by Mayor and Council, is charged in the sky of protecting the historic tone of the district through review of proposed exterior changes.