2012 Holiday Schedule

Miller County, the state's 117th county, was created by the state legislature in 1856 out of portions of Early and Baker counties and 283 square miles. The county was named for attorney Andrew Miller, who served in the state senate and later became president of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
 
Colquitt was designated as the county seat in the same year as the county's founding. The city was named after Walter T. Colquitt, a clergyman, attorney, and judge, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1843 to 1848. The county's first courthouse, built in Colquitt, was replaced once and then burned twice before the current structure was completed in 1977. While Colquitt remains the only Miller County Courthouse incorporated city in Miller County, there are twenty other small communities.
 
At the turn of the twenty-first century, cotton, peanuts, and corn for grain were the top crops in Miller County, which today ranks fourth in total peanut production in Georgia.
 
Miller County is home to Georgia's official folklife play, Swamp Gravy. The ever-changing play is regularly scheduled at the historic Cotton Hall in Colquitt, which also houses the Museum of Southern Cultures. Storytelling circles are also popular because of the play. The Swamp Gravy Institute, an arts service organization formed as an outgrowth of the play, is a consulting and training unit of the Colquitt-Miller Arts Council. A storytelling festival is held in Colquitt in August, and the May-Haw Festival, honoring the tart south Georgia fruit, is held in April at Spring Creek Park, which also contains ecologically fragile wetlands.
 
The ongoing Millennium Murals Project, funded by public and private sources, has become a community beautification project. Using walls on area schools and business establishments, project designers pair artists with local middle and high school students, teachers, and community members. The murals depict stories told by locals about community happenings.
 
According to the 2000 U.S. census, the population of Miller County is 6,383 (70.3 percent white, 28.9 percent black, and 0.7 percent Hispanic), an increase of 2 percent since 1990.