Blairsville, GA

Blairsville is Union County's seat in the mountains of north Georgia, founded near the Nottely River and now shaped by the lake and trail country around it. The city incorporated in 1835 and remains the county's only incorporated community. The Historic Union County Courthouse, built in 1899, sits at the center of downtown and now houses local history, a military museum, and other collections. That courthouse square gives Blairsville a clear center even as the surrounding roads climb into the Blue Ridge.

ATTRHarrison Keely / CC BY 4.0

South of town, the Mountain Life Museum preserves the 1906 Grapel Mock House and the 1861 Payne Cabin. Lake Nottely, formed by a Tennessee Valley Authority dam in 1942, adds a large working-and-recreation landscape to the county map, and the Appalachian Trail passes through the wider area at the Walasi-Yi Center. Blairsville is a courthouse town with a mountain-town rhythm: county errands around the square, lake roads beyond town, and trail hikers moving through the same North Georgia landscape that holds the county's Cherokee and settler histories.