Macon

Macon is a city in central Georgia, on the Ocmulgee River at the fall line between the hills of the Piedmont and the coastal plain. Little Richard was born there, and Otis Redding grew up in the city.

Creek people lived along the river when the town site was chosen. Macon was laid out in 1823 near a trading post on the river and named after Nathaniel Macon, a politician from North Carolina. Cotton was shipped down the Ocmulgee and later by railway, and Macon grew into a trading town with large mansions of the cotton era. In the 1970s Capricorn Records, a label based in the city, recorded the Allman Brothers Band and other Southern rock groups. Mercer University, founded by Baptists in the 1830s, has its main campus and its law and medical schools in the city.

Kumho Tire makes car tires at its plant in Macon, its only factory in the United States. Cotton and timber from the farms of central Georgia still pass through the city by rail.

The Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park keeps the Great Temple Mound, built by Mississippian people about a thousand years ago, and an earth lodge with its original clay floor. The Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House, the Tudor-style house where the band lived, shows their guitars and records. The Hay House, an Italian Renaissance revival mansion of the 1850s, was built with indoor plumbing and an early central heating system. Each March the Cherry Blossom Festival celebrates the Yoshino cherry trees that bloom along the streets of the city.