Here is what you didn’t know about Georgia

In 1733, just as the colony was founded, James Oglethorpe established Trustees’ Garden in Savannah: ten acres set aside to test which crops could thrive in the new territory. Mulberry trees were planted for silk production, along with cotton, indigo, peaches and medicinal plants.

Silk production never took off as hoped, but the garden left a mark that lasts to this day: it helped introduce peach and cotton cultivation, two crops that went on to define much of Georgia’s agricultural identity in the centuries that followed. Today it is recognized as one of the earliest experimental gardens in North America.

On May 8, 1886, pharmacist John Pemberton carried his freshly prepared syrup to Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta, where the first glass of Coca-Cola was served. It sold for five cents as a soda fountain drink and was marketed as a non-alcoholic alternative at a time when Atlanta and Fulton County had passed prohibition legislation.

What started as a local product went on to become one of the most recognized brands on the planet, and its origin remains one of the facts that surprises first-time visitors most when they discover it all began just a few blocks from downtown Atlanta.

Georgia is known as "the Peach State," and it is true that the peach is its official state fruit, designated in 1995. But the state tree is a different one: since 1937, that honor has belonged to the Southern Live Oak, the tree that shades much of the state’s historic squares, including several in Savannah.

It is a small detail, but it reveals something interesting: the "Peach State" identity rests more on the fruit and its agricultural history than on the tree that technically represents Georgia among its official symbols.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. He is the only president born in the state. Franklin D. Roosevelt, while not born in Georgia, had a deep connection to it: he visited Warm Springs regularly for health reasons and died there in 1945, while still serving as president.

On the journalism side, the first Pulitzer Prize won by a Georgia newspaper went to the Columbus Enquirer-Sun in 1926, in the public service category, for its coverage of resistance to teaching evolution in public schools and of Ku Klux Klan activity. Since then, other newspapers in the state, including the Atlanta Constitution, have added several more prizes across different decades.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is buried in Atlanta, at the King Center, in a tomb faced with Georgia marble. His body was moved there in 1970, and since 2006 he has rested alongside his wife, Coretta Scott King. The site, located on Auburn Avenue, remains one of the most visited memorial locations tied to the U.S. civil rights movement.

And on the record-setting side, Georgia holds another fact that surprises many people: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has been the busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic for nearly every year since 1998, with the sole exception of 2020. That constant movement of people and business is part of what keeps the region’s economy running day to day.