Statesboro, GA news and local guide

During Sherman's March to the Sea, a Union officer is said to have asked a saloon keeper for directions to Statesboro and been told, "You are standing in the middle of town." The soldiers destroyed the courthouse, a log building that doubled as a barn when court was not sitting. After the war the town grew into a major center of southeastern Georgia, and many freedmen stayed in the area as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Racial violence by whites against Black people increased after Reconstruction, and from 1880 to 1930 Georgia had the highest rate of lynchings of any state. On August 16, 1904, after two Black men, Paul Reed and Will Cato, were convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white farm family and sentenced to death, a mob seized them from the courthouse and burned them to death near Statesboro, and other Black men were lynched in Bulloch County later that month. Sources Wikipedia: Statesboro, Georgia