Carrie Williams Jones County Historian

This area was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 1974. The town of Clinton, established as a county seat of Jones County in 1809, was the center of political, educational, and industrial growth in the frontier areas of the lower Piedmont region of Georgia. The town is significant in Georgia history as the site of one of the country’s largest cotton gin factories, the Griswoldville Cotton Gin Factory, and the site of one of the first female seminaries, the Clinton Female Seminary.

Clinton Female Seminary was incorporated on December 15, 1821by Act of Legislature. This successful school under Rev. Thomas Bog Slade, honor graduate of Chapel Hill, N. C. was the fore-runner of Georgia Female College (Wesleyan) in Macon. On January 9, 1939 Prof. Slade went to Wesleyan as leading instructor taking with him 30 students and two of his best teachers with him. He wrote the first diploma delivered at Wesleyan, said to be the first degree to be granted by any college to a woman.

The town is also significant architecturally for its collection of early 19th century residential and public structures, one of the largest intact groupings in the state, of which several are attributed to master craftsman-architect Daniel Pratt. The one and two-story frame houses of the town are situated along narrow tree-lined streets arranged in a grid pattern around a central courthouse square. Twelve major houses remain from the town’s chief period of significance. Built between 1809 and 1830, these resources are characterized as braced frame central hall, hall-parlor, I-house, and plantation plain type houses with clapboard siding and brick pier foundations. In addition to the homes is the historic resource, Clinton Methodist Church, a braced frame, front gable church built c 1821. The town retains its early 19th century character and village-like atmosphere.