History UnderfootAtlanta
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  • December 20, 1853
  • Fulton County

Fulton County created (1853)

The legislature carved Fulton County from DeKalb by an act approved December 20, 1853, and made Atlanta the county seat.

See it on the map All Early records

The record

The act was amended and corrected on February 7, 1854, and the first county officers were commissioned on February 15, 1854 (GHS). The act did not say whom the name honored; in 1954 the Fulton County Centennial Commission chose Robert Fulton, the steamboat inventor, over Hamilton Fulton, Georgia's chief engineer in 1826. Parts of Milton and Campbell counties were added from 1872, and the 1932 consolidation fixed the modern boundaries. The 1860 census counted 14,427 people in Fulton, 2,955 of them enslaved.

Today: Marker in downtown Atlanta.