Hall County, in northeast Georgia, was created in 1818 from Indian lands and named for Lyman Hall, signer of the Declaration of Independence and Georgia’s governor from 1783 to 1784. Hall was the forty-fifth Georgia county to be created. Its seat of government, Gainesville, was incorporated in 1821.

Early settlers were largely Scots-Irish, English, and German stock from the Carolinas and Virginia, chiefly Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Few African Americans lived in this area of small farms. The discovery of gold north of Hall in 1828 attracted thousands of newcomers to the area. The passing of the gold rush in the 1830s saw the return to the small-farm grain and livestock agricultural economy.

Though distant from the combat of the Civil War (1861-65), Hall County inhabitants provided nine companies of men to the Southern cause. Hall’s greatest Civil War connection, however, is a postwar resident, General James Longstreet, who moved to Gainesville in 1875 as postmaster and hotel operator, anticipating that the town would become the southeastern railroad hub. Longstreet purchased the forty-room Piedmont Hotel and 115 acres just outside the town, where he raised poultry and planted vineyards.

Railroads came to Hall County in 1871, leading to the creation of a local textile industry by the turn of the century. Three large mills dominated nonagricultural employment in the county between the 1920s and midcentury. After the destructive Gainesville tornado of 1936 and with the advent of World War II (1941-45), Hall County, especially Gainesville, became the location for the rise of the state’s poultry industry. The Hall County seed-and-feed store operator Jesse Jewell was the father of large-scale growing and processing and an innovator in the frozen-chicken market. Poultry supplanted textiles as the leading industry in the area, and today Georgia claims the title “Poultry Capital of the World.” Several major poultry producers, including Gress Foods, King’s Delight, Mar-Jac Poultry, and Pilgrim’s Pride are located in the county.

The damming of the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s, flooding 38,000 acres, created Lake Lanier, which brings 10 million visitors each year to the area. Twenty-first-century Hall County is largely the product of Lake Lanier’s influence.