Chester, William T.

Whitfield County is located in northwest Georgia at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, about thirty miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and eighty miles north of Atlanta. It shares a northern border with Tennessee and covers nearly 290 square miles. The county was formed from part of Murray County in 1851 and named for the Reverend George Whitefield, an Englishman who first visited Georgia in 1738. Whitefield created the Bethesda orphan house near Savannah in 1740. In writing the act that created the county, the state legislature omitted the "e" in "Whitefield," to reflect the correct pronunciation of the name.