Lake Park, GA

Lake Park is a Lowndes County city that grew beside the Georgia Southern and Florida Railway. The 2020 census counted 932 residents, up from 733 in 2010. It was laid out in 1889 as Lawrence, after founder Lawrence A. Wisenbaker, whose family helped secure the railroad right-of-way. In 1890, the nearby community of Twin Lakes took the name Lake Park. The town's old cemetery sits on the site of an 1878 church, one of the small physical reminders that the rail-era town grew out of an earlier rural settlement.

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US 41 runs through the center as Marion Avenue, and the local economy still meets the road through timber, vegetables, and blueberries around town. The older commercial story is preserved in Ewell Brown's General Store, which now serves as a museum, alongside the Edith Garlow Johnston Lakes Library. Early businesses included a turpentine still, cotton gin, peat-moss operation, and Spanish-moss factory; those names show why Lake Park grew as a work town before it became a place people pass through on the way across South Georgia.