Page "Columbia County, Georgia" Paragraph 50

The war took a heavy toll on the white male population of the county ; a plaque behind the bench in the main Courtroom bears the names of Columbia County's Confederate dead.

During Reconstruction, the County was subject to military occupation.

Because of significant Ku Klux Klan violence in the late 1860s, it was attached to a special district including Warren, Wilkes, and Oglethorpe counties.

Additional Union forces were sent there to try to suppress the insurgents and their vigilante crimes against freedmen.

They had been steadily reported by the Freedman's Bureau, whose reports included a mob lynching of a freedman in Appling in July 1866.