Georgia is where More Than Just Parks began. The Pattiz brothers grew up here, and I taught history in this state for decades before I retired in 2018 and joined them. Since then I have spent a good part of my time walking the grounds of the places I used to teach about from a classroom.
This list runs from number 15 down to my pick for number 1. Some of these are managed by the National Park Service. Others are run by Georgia State Parks. I have tried to be clear about which is which, because the difference matters when you plan a visit and when you understand how a place came to be protected.
A few of these names changed in recent years, and I have used the current, correct designations throughout. Let’s get started.
Historic Sites In Georgia At A Glance
| Site | Designation | Managed By | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jimmy Carter National Historical Park | National Historical Park | National Park Service | Plains |
| Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park | National Historical Park | National Park Service | Atlanta |
| The Little White House | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Warm Springs |
| Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park | National Military Park | National Park Service | Fort Oglethorpe (GA) / Chattanooga (TN) |
| Fort Pulaski National Monument | National Monument | National Park Service | Cockspur Island, near Savannah |
| Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park | National Historical Park | National Park Service | Macon |
| Andersonville National Historic Site | National Historic Site | National Park Service | Andersonville |
| Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park | National Battlefield Park | National Park Service | near Marietta |
| Fort Frederica National Monument | National Monument | National Park Service | St. Simons Island |
| Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Irwinville |
| Dahlonega Gold Museum State Historic Site | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Dahlonega |
| Reynolds Mansion on Sapelo Island | State Historic Property | State of Georgia | Sapelo Island |
| Pickett’s Mill Battlefield State Historic Site | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Dallas |
| Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Juliette |
| Fort King George State Historic Site | State Historic Site | Georgia State Parks | Darien |
15. Fort King George State Historic Site
We open in Darien, on the Georgia coast, at the oldest English fort built in what is now the state. Fort King George went up in 1721, more than a decade before James Oglethorpe founded the Georgia colony, and it marked the southern edge of British claims against Spanish Florida.
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Soldiers garrisoned here lived hard. Disease and the climate took a heavy toll, and the fort was occupied for only about a decade before the troops withdrew. Today Georgia State Parks runs the site, with a reconstructed blockhouse, a small museum, and the marshy Altamaha River views that those first soldiers would have known.
14. Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site
In Juliette you will find one of the most complete collections of original farm buildings in the state. The Jarrell family worked this middle Georgia land for roughly a century, and more than twenty of their structures still stand, from the plantation house to the cotton gin, sawmill, and gristmill.
I include it because it tells the harder part of the story plainly. Before the Civil War this was a working plantation, and that work was done by enslaved people. The site does not look away from that. After emancipation the Jarrells stayed on and kept farming into the twentieth century, which is why so much survives.
Georgia State Parks manages the property now. Walking among the buildings is the closest thing I know to standing inside a working farm of the period.
13. Pickett’s Mill Battlefield State Historic Site
Pickett’s Mill, near Dallas, is one of the best preserved Civil War battlefields anywhere in the country. There are no modern intrusions across the core of the field. The ravines and ridges look much as they did on May 27, 1864, when the fighting happened here as part of the Atlanta Campaign.
Union forces under General Oliver O. Howard attacked Confederate troops under General Patrick Cleburne across this rough, wooded terrain, and the assault failed at a steep cost. The state of Georgia acquired the land in the 1930s. The trails today follow the lines of the attack, and a visitor center helps you read the ground.
12. Reynolds Mansion On Sapelo Island
Getting to Sapelo Island takes a ferry, and that effort is part of what makes it worthwhile. The mansion has long roots. The original tabby house was built by the planter Thomas Spalding in the early 1800s, rebuilt in 1912 by Howard Coffin, and then purchased in 1934 by tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds Jr., who renovated it into the home you tour today.
The Reynolds family sold the island to the state in the 1970s, and most of Sapelo is now the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve. The mansion is on the National Register of Historic Places and managed by the state.
One thing I want visitors to understand before they go. Sapelo is home to Hog Hammock, also written Hogg Hummock, one of the last Gullah-Geechee communities on the Georgia coast. Its residents are descendants of people once enslaved on the island, and they have kept their language, foodways, and traditions alive for generations. Visit with respect for the fact that this is a living community, not a museum.
11. Dahlonega Gold Museum State Historic Site
When most people picture a gold rush they think of California in 1849. Georgia got there first. Gold was found near Dahlonega in 1828, and the rush that followed brought thousands of prospectors into the north Georgia mountains, with painful consequences for the Cherokee who lived there.
The museum sits inside the old Lumpkin County Courthouse, the oldest courthouse building in Georgia, built in the 1830s. A branch of the U.S. Mint operated in Dahlonega for years and struck gold coins until the Civil War. Georgia State Parks runs the museum, and its exhibits and short film tell the story well.
10. Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site
Near Irwinville stands the spot where the Civil War effectively ended for the Confederate government. On May 10, 1865, Union cavalry captured Jefferson Davis, the only president the Confederate States ever had, as he tried to flee south.
I will be honest about why this site is worth your time. Davis was the leader of a government founded to preserve slavery, and the monument here, dedicated in the 1930s, reflects the era that built it more than the man’s actual record. Go for the history, and read the place critically. Georgia State Parks manages the grounds and a small museum that covers the capture and the larger story of the war’s end.
9. Fort Frederica National Monument
Long before the Civil War, the fate of British Georgia was decided on St. Simons Island. James Oglethorpe founded the fortified town of Frederica in 1736 as the colony’s military shield against Spanish Florida. For a while it was one of the most important settlements in the region.
In 1742 Oglethorpe’s outnumbered forces turned back a Spanish invasion at the nearby Battle of Bloody Marsh, which secured British control of the coast. The town was abandoned within a few years, and only foundations remain. It became a national monument in 1936, and the National Park Service now protects the ruins, the tabby walls, and a fine museum.
8. Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park
Just outside Marietta, Kennesaw Mountain preserves one of the sharpest clashes of the Atlanta Campaign. On June 27, 1864, General William T. Sherman ordered a frontal assault against the entrenched Confederate army of General Joseph E. Johnston dug in along these slopes.
The attack was a costly failure for the Union, though Sherman soon flanked the position and pressed on toward Atlanta. The park covers more than 2,900 acres today, with a visitor center, preserved earthworks, and trails that climb to the summit. The view from the top, especially in fall, is one of the best near Atlanta. The National Park Service manages the battlefield.
7. Andersonville National Historic Site
Some places are hard to visit, and they should be. Andersonville, officially Camp Sumter, was the largest and most notorious Confederate prison of the Civil War. Of roughly 45,000 Union soldiers held here, close to 13,000 died of disease, exposure, and starvation in little more than a year.
A prisoner named Robert Kellogg described walking through the gate and seeing men reduced to “mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin.” That suffering is the heart of what this place asks you to remember. The National Cemetery here holds nearly 20,000 graves.
The National Park Service manages the site, which is also home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, the only museum in the country devoted to the experience of American prisoners of war across all our conflicts. Give yourself time, and go quietly.
6. Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
At Macon you can stand on ground that holds more than 12,000 years of continuous human history. Ocmulgee Mounds is the ancestral homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the great earthworks here were raised by their ancestors during the Mississippian period, roughly a thousand years ago.
I want to be precise about the name, because it changed. For decades this was Ocmulgee National Monument. In 2019 Congress redesignated it Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation has been a close partner in its stewardship. There is now an active, broadly supported effort to expand the area into a national park and preserve, which would be Georgia’s first.
You can climb the Great Temple Mound, which rises about 55 feet, and step inside a reconstructed earthlodge with an original floor that is roughly a thousand years old. The mounds, burial sites, and the river trail deserve to be walked slowly and with respect for the people whose home this remains.
5. Fort Pulaski National Monument
Fort Pulaski sits on Cockspur Island, guarding the river approach to Savannah. Its brick walls run seven and a half feet thick, and for a generation engineers believed masonry like this was unbreakable. A young lieutenant fresh out of West Point named Robert E. Lee worked on its construction beginning in 1829.
That belief ended here. In April 1862, Union forces on Tybee Island opened fire with new rifled cannon, and within about thirty hours they breached walls everyone had thought impregnable. The siege changed military engineering worldwide and made every masonry fort obsolete overnight.
The National Park Service manages the monument. You can still see the shell damage in the walls, walk the ramparts, and visit the nearby Cockspur Island Lighthouse. Bring binoculars, because the marshes here are full of birds.
4. Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park
In the northwest corner of the state lies the first national military park ever created in the United States. Congress authorized Chickamauga and Chattanooga in 1890, and it was dedicated in 1895 by veterans of both armies. It remains the largest national military park in the country, and the Chickamauga battlefield itself is in Georgia.
The Battle of Chickamauga, fought September 19 and 20, 1863, was one of the bloodiest of the entire war, with more than 34,000 casualties. The Confederate victory there bottled up the Union army in Chattanooga, until Ulysses S. Grant arrived, broke the siege, and opened the road into the Deep South.
The National Park Service manages the park, and it is enormous. There are hundreds of monuments, miles of trails, and a driving tour across the Georgia battlefield. The early veterans laid this place out so future generations could understand exactly what happened on each piece of ground, and that careful design still shows.
3. The Little White House At Warm Springs
In Warm Springs you can walk through the modest cottage where Franklin D. Roosevelt found relief from polio in the warm mineral waters, and where he died on April 12, 1945, while sitting for a portrait. It is a state historic site managed by Georgia State Parks, not a federal one, and it is one of the most affecting presidential places I have visited.
What stays with people is how plain the house is. The unfinished portrait still sits on its easel. Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression and most of the Second World War from a wheelchair, and his time at Warm Springs shaped how he understood the lives of ordinary Americans who were struggling.
Beyond the cottage, the museum holds his hand-controlled cars, gifts from around the world, and the famous wheelchair he built from a kitchen chair. The surrounding F.D. Roosevelt State Park and the Pine Mountain Trail are worth adding to the day.
2. Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park
My final two sites honor two Georgians who each received the Nobel Peace Prize. The first is in Atlanta, on Auburn Avenue, where Martin Luther King Jr. was born, preached, and is buried.
A note on the name, because it changed in 2018. What had long been the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site is now the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. The National Park Service preserves the core of his world here: his birth home, the original Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father preached, and the King Center, where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed.
King was born in this neighborhood in 1929 and assassinated in Memphis in 1968. In between, he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, and the campaigns that brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Park Service has restored the surrounding houses to their 1930s and 1940s appearance, so you can walk the block as the young King knew it. Stand inside Ebenezer and you understand a little more about where that voice came from.
1. Jimmy Carter National Historical Park
My number one is in Plains, the small farming town that shaped the only Georgian ever elected president. The Jimmy Carter National Historical Park tells the story of a man whose reputation has grown steadily with time.
A note on the name and on the man. The site was redesignated from a national historic site to a national historical park in 2021. And on December 29, 2024, Jimmy Carter died at his home in Plains at the age of 100, the longest-lived president in American history. His wife Rosalynn had died the year before, in November 2023. The park now preserves and interprets the full arc of a life lived almost entirely in this one town.
History has caught up with Carter. As president he brokered the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, made human rights a pillar of American foreign policy, and through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act he protected more than 100 million acres and doubled the size of the national park system. That remains the single largest expansion of protected land in the nation’s history.
“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”
Jimmy Carter
At the park you can tour the Boyhood Farm, restored to its 1930s look, where Carter grew up without electricity or running water. You can visit the old Plains High School, now the park museum, and see the train depot that served as his 1976 campaign headquarters. The National Park Service manages it all, and the town itself, only a few hundred people strong, is part of the experience.
To read more about Carter’s conservation record, see our piece on why we consider him the greatest conservation president in American history.
More Things To Do In Georgia
If you are planning a trip around these places, here are a few of our other Georgia guides worth reading next.
- Georgia National Parks. A full guide to the national park sites across the state, from the coast to the mountains.
- National Parks Near Atlanta. The Park Service sites within easy reach of the city, useful if you are based in Atlanta.
- Things To Do At Ocmulgee Mounds. Our closer look at the mounds in Macon, with a video guide.
We do not make this up out of thin air. And in 2018, after a lifetime in the history classroom, I joined them to help tell the stories behind these places. Georgia is home, and these fifteen sites are a good part of the reason why.
