Valdosta is a town that was founded on railroad hopes. The inhabitants of the town of Troupville hoped the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad Company would take its new line through that town, but the company instead chose a route several miles away. Many Troupville residents relocated to the present site of Valdosta, moving buildings on roller logs. Troupville itself was largely abandoned.

The first train reached Valdosta in July 1860, on the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad; the legacy of the Atlantic and Gulf lives on in the CSX corporation, its corporate descendant. Eventually the Atlantic Coast line and Southern Railway, through a subsidiary, dominated the rails in Lowndes County

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Shipping cotton and naval stores brought many freight trains through Valdosta in the late 19th century.

In 1898 the Valdosta Street Railway was chartered, with the trolley cars first rolling in 1900. The original system stretched for two miles, from the downtown Patterson Street area to the former Pine Park fairgrounds (an area bounded by N. Patterson, E. Park Avenue, Williams Street, and E. Moore Street.) The service added a stop at "South Georgia State Normal College" (now VSU) when the school opened in 1913. A waiting shelter for the railway still stands on VSU's Main Campus front lawn. The line also ran to Remerton and to the area near the intersection of Gordon Street and North Forrest Street.

The Valdosta Street Railway went out of business in 1925, and the rails were paved over. During World War II, the rails were dug up and donated to a scrap metal drive.

The 1900 Georgia State Fair, held at the Pine Park Fairgrounds in Valdosta, marked Valdosta and Lowndes County as an indispensable center of Georgia commerce and industry--an equal to towns like Thomasville, Macon, and Savannah.

The historic Lowndes County Courthouse was built in 1905 and now has a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. The courthouse lawn hosts a number of monuments to war veterans and to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. No longer used as a courthouse due to limited space — those functions were transferred to a modern annex nearby — the old courthouse's lawn is still a popular spot for public gatherings, such as campaign meetings, the annual Brown Bag Concert series and the annual 100 Black Men Barbecue Competiton.

Click here to view a connected series, "Law and Order in Lowndes County."

Coverage of a local murder trial that gained national attention in 1905 resulted in the then-twice weekly Valdosta Times converting to a daily newspaper.

The trial centered on bad blood between neighbors Joe Rawlins and W.L. Carter, which grew into feud that took the lives of two Carter children. Rawlins eventually confessed to the murders and was hanged.

In 1910, Valdosta had the largest inland sea island cotton market in the world, making it the richest city in the nation per capita. The establishment of a cotton mill led to the creation of Remerton, a town now entirely surrounded by Valdosta yet with a separate city charter. By this time, melons had also become a major economic force in Lowndes County. Click here to view a connected series about Valdosta and Lowndes County's "Golden Age of Growth".

Valdosta High School first fielded a football team in 1913. The VHS Wildcats have since become America's winningest high school football team with 911 wins as of the 2017 season.

The annual grudge match between Valdosta High and its crosstown rival, the Lowndes High School Vikings, began in 1968 and has grown to the point the game has been carried by ESPN and CBS Sports.

Click here to view a connected series on Valdosta and Lowndes County's Gridiron History

Though chartered in 1906, South Georgia State Normal College - later Valdosta State University - didn't open its doors in Valdosta until January 1913 as a state-supported two-year public college for women. The college opened with three freshmen and 15 "sub-freshmen."

In 1922, the college became a four-year school with a name change to Georgia State Womans College.

Click here to view a connected series about the history of higher education in Valdosta and Lowndes County

The devastation to cotton crops in the South caused by the boll weevil virtually eliminated sea island cotton, long a backbone of Valdosta's economy.

At the same time, mechanical advances in the rolling of tobacco paper made it possible to mass-produce cigarettes for the first time, and low-priced smokes quickly became available to the masses, with South Georgia shifting its farming gears to meet the demand.

The spread of the boll weevil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ravaged cotton production across all of Georgia, leading to experiments to find pesticides and other ways of controlling the pest. Some of those experiments were carried out in Lowndes County in the 1920s.

The term "naval stores" refers to forest products such as timber and resin used extensively in the maritime trade. From around 1900 to 1926, Georgia had the United States' largest naval stores industry, and Valdosta had the world's largest inland naval stores market.

As the boll weevil devastated the cotton industry, Judge Harry Langdale of Valdosta purchased land once used for cotton and filled it with new-growth forest to produce gum turpentine, used extensively at sea as a solvent and as a medicine.

Naval stores became less of an economic factor in South Georgia as the industry moved away from small-farm operations to conglomerates.

In 1937, Valdosta's first radio station signed on: WGOV (now WGUN), 950 AM, an affiliate of the Mutual Network, which tended to serve smaller market cities. The call sign "WGOV" honored former Georgia Governor Ed Rivers, whose family owned the station. Before WGOV signed on, listening to broadcast radio was only possible in Valdosta by tuning in a few high-power "clear channel" stations (facilities given sole use of one frequency in the entire U.S.) from Atlanta and Tallahassee.

The military came to Lowndes County in 1941 when "Moody Field," the predecessor to the modern Moody Air Force Base, was built as a flight training facility. After a five-year closure following the end of World War II, the base was reopened, continuing undergraduate pilot training until 1975. It now hosts an A-10 wing and rescue forces.

Click here to view a connected series about Moody Air Force Base

Valdosta's first publicly-owned hospital, Pineview General Hospital, opened on June 1, 1955. Before Pineview opened, medical care in Valdosta was largely handled by private physician-owned hospitals and sickrooms, notably Little-Griffin Hospital. It was common practice for these facilities to accept only patients of the doctors who owned them.

The hospital's name was changed to South Georgia Medical Center in 1971.

A major provider of electricity in Valdosta and Lowndes County, Georgia Power first came to Valdosta in 1957, when it acquired Georgia Power & Light Company.

In 1935, President Frankln D. Roosevelt signed into existence the Rural Electrification Administration, part of a plan to get rural areas of America "on the grid." Later that year, the first steps were taken to create a rural electricity provider in Colquitt County - the Colquitt County Rural Electic Company. By 1969, the company had extended service to rural Lowndes County and opened a district office in Valdosta. In 1976, with service extended to Brooks, Berrien and Cook counties, the company changed its name to Colquitt Electric Membership Corporation (Colquitt EMC.)

in 1974, educator Ruth Council became the first African-American person elected to Valdosta's City Council.

Well into the 20th Century, the south end of Valdosta was dominated by multiple train tracks and the depots, hotels and restaurants that catered to passenger train customers.

With the end of World War II and the expansion of interstate highways and widebody jet air service, passenger rail travel across the U.S. entered a steep decline. Most commercial railroads got out of the passenger business in 1971 with the formation of Amtrak, a quasi-publicly owned corporation which took over the bulk of what was left of America's passenger routes. Interstate 75 was rolled out through Lowndes County in the 1960s; the last passenger train serving Valdosta, Amtrak's Floridian, was canceled in October 1979.

Until the 1980s, traffic on the south end of Valdosta was severely compromised by five sets of train tracks that crossed Ashley and Patterson streets. Anyone driving north into the city stood a fair chance of being stopped for lengthy periods by a train - including ambulances.

The James Beck overpass, dedicated in 1982, eliminated the traffic problem by carrying drivers far above the rails. However, to build the overpass, Valdosta had to tear down a section of downtown dominated by black-owned businesses which had long been a centerpiece of the city's African-American culture.

On April 12, 1991, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney released a list of 43 military bases proposed for closure under the Base Realignment and Closure Commission as a money-saving measure.

Valdosta and Lowndes County officials and business leaders worked to stop the base's possible closure, crunching numbers to show that the Department of Defense based its decision on old or faulty data. On June 30, BRAC commissioners voted to remove the base from the list.

In 1922, the original "South Georgia State Normal College" went from a two-year curriculum to a four-year institution, becoming "Georgia State Womans College."

In 1950, Georgia's Board of Regents, which oversees the state's public colleges, decided to change Georgia State Womans College into a coeducational facility, Valdosta State College.

Another upgrade came in the 1990s. In 1993, the Georgia Board of Regents changed Valdosta State College into Valdosta State University.

VSU was the second "regional university" in the University System of Georgia.

Click here to view a connected series about the history of higher education in Valdosta and Lowndes County

In July 2008, the sports broacaster ESPN sponsored a contest to see which of several cities with multiple sports titles to its name would be declared Titletown. Viewers were allowed to cast votes for their favorite city. In the end, Valdosta won. Click here to view a connected series on Valdosta and Lowndes County's Gridiron History

Following the trial, conviction and removal from office of the previous mayor, John Fretti, Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Joseph "Sonny" Vickers was sworn in as Valdosta's first black mayor.

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump paid a campaign visit to Valdosta on Feb. 29, 2016, speaking to a crowd of thousands at a private rally in Valdosta State University's P.E. Complex. The event gained nationwide attention when approximately 30 black students were removed from the private function; the Trump campaign originally denied knowing anything about the removal, but Valdosta's police chief said the students were ordered out by Trump's people because they were using foul language, which the students later denied.