Valdosta, Georgia: Named for a Governor's Plantation

When the railroad bypassed Troupville, the new town four miles east took the name of Governor George M. Troup’s favorite plantation, Valdosta. So the county seat traded a name honoring the governor for the name of the place he liked to live. What that plantation name means is another story, and the old books tell it three different ways.

The town the surveyors skipped

Lowndes County’s first county seat was Troupville, named for Troup, who’d been one of Georgia’s best-known governors. In his 1913 Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, Lucian Lamar Knight says it sat between the Withlacoochee and Little rivers, and in 1849 it had about twenty families, three hotels, two churches, four stores, two doctors, and four lawyers.

Then came the railroad. When the first line was planned through the county, Knight writes, “Troupville was ignored by the surveyors, who ran the line some four miles to the east.” A new town grew up beside the tracks and became the county seat. Valdosta was incorporated in 1860, according to the Cyclopedia of Georgia that Allen D. Candler and Clement A. Evans edited in 1906. One by one the businesses moved over, and by Knight’s time, according to Major Varnadoe, whom he cites, “little more than a sand hill” marked where Troupville had stood.

A newspaperman’s idea

Knight says the name “is said to have been given to the town by a Mr. DeLyon, who then owned and edited the county newspaper.” DeLyon admired Troup, and since the town that carried the governor’s name was about to disappear, he proposed the name of Troup’s home instead. “There were some who advocated Troupville,” Knight writes. “But the majority preferred Valdosta.”

The plantation was in Laurens County. Knight says Troup owned two big plantations there, Valdosta and Vallombrosa, and lived on Valdosta. The other one, Vallombrosa, was named for a noted retreat near the Italian city of Florence.

Italian valley, Swiss Alps, or Spanish beauty?

Here’s the odd part. If you read Knight closely, he explains the name twice in the same book and doesn’t quite agree with himself. In the Laurens County sketch, he says Valdosta “was named for a celebrated valley among the Swiss Alps.” In the Lowndes County sketch, he goes into detail: the original form was “Val d’ Osta,” an Alpine valley “which descends into the vineyards of Northern Italy,” with the old town of Aosta at its foot.

Henry Gannett went another way entirely in his 1905 place-names book for the U.S. Geological Survey. He calls Valdosta a word “from the Spanish, meaning ‘vale of beauty.’” Gannett doesn’t say where he got that, and none of the Georgia books checked for this article back it up.

The longer version, with the valley and the town of Aosta named, is the most specific of the three. So if you’re from Valdosta, your hometown’s name most likely traveled from an Alpine valley to a governor’s plantation in Laurens County before it ever reached Lowndes.

Sources & further reading

• Lucian Lamar Knight, Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, vol. 1 (1913). Troup’s plantations, Valdosta and Vallombrosa, and the “Swiss Alps” line (pp. 720-721); Troupville, the railroad, Mr. DeLyon, the vote for Valdosta, and “Val d’ Osta” (pp. 750-752).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The “vale of beauty” reading.
• Allen D. Candler and Clement A. Evans, eds., Cyclopedia of Georgia, vol. 3 (1906). Valdosta incorporated in 1860.
• GNIS feature 324649 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Valdosta.