Arnoldsville, GA

Arnoldsville is an Oglethorpe County city in northeast Georgia, where the 2020 census counted 431 residents. The settlement began as Cherokee Corner near an older Cherokee trading route. In 1894, local store owner and postmaster Edwin Shaw renamed the place Edwin; two years later, N. D. Arnold bought the store and the town adopted his name. Arnold later divided thousands of acres into smaller farms to encourage new settlement.

ATTRhttps://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ga0374.photos.054313p / Public domain

U.S. Route 78 passes just south of Arnoldsville, leading east to Crawford and northwest to Athens. The city was incorporated in 1969, but its history reaches back to Virginia settlers, tobacco and cotton farms, and the earlier trading community. Oglethorpe County's large rural landscape still surrounds the city, while the road keeps Arnoldsville tied to Athens and nearby communities. Arnoldsville's story is a sequence of names—Cherokee Corner, Edwin, and Arnoldsville—held together by a store, a post office, a highway, and the small farms around town. The old names are still part of local memory.