Origin of Dunwoody Name

 Dunwoody Name Comes From Coastal Georgia Family

By Sidney B. Horne
Reprinted from May 21, 1981
At the time of the founding of DeKalb County in 1822, the town of Darien on Georgia’s coast was the banking capital of the South. From there a few…
years later would go out adventurous men in search of gold and who would eventually be responsible for the founding of our community, Dunwoody. Darien is today a sleepy fishing village. Shrimp boats bobble in the tidal river waters and…
Known by residents as “The Chimney,” this 100-year-old structure was spared from destruction in 1985 by a local power company decided that saving a piece of rural history was beneficial to the community…
new community Roswell. with hill to his new home in Roswell and established them in Mimosa Hall, a landmark until today. His son Charles grew up there and went off to war with other young confederates in 1860. He returned a few years later, beaten but not defeated.
Major Charles Dunwoody owned land across the river in DeKalb County, and it was there he moved after the war. The area was in need of rebuilding following its devastation in the war, and Dunwoody set out to do just that. He did his job so well that sixteen years later, in 1881, the community would take his name as its own. It is a name that has worn well for the past 107 years.
There is little hint that large plantation owners once operated such a powerful banking institution there, but that was the situation in 1828 when gold was discovered in North Georgia’s Lumpkin County. “Auraria,” a Latin word meaning “gold,” was the name given the boom town which sprang up there as the gold fever attracted a motley crowd. A poem by the time recorded of those who came to Auraria:
And as for people they’re so thick. You might stir them with a stick. Of people we have every hue, Some white, red, yaller, black and blue. Other, with dirt so covered well, What color they, I could not tell.”
Two of those who went in search of the yellow ore are Roswell King, Darien banker, and his friend, John Dunwoody, from Liberty County. It is not recorded how they fared in the gold mines, but we know they discovered a site on the Chattahoochee River as ideal for cotton and wool mills. They built two such mills and beautiful homes and they called their…