Georgia
TIME names Georgia park 1 of the World's Greatest Places of 2025
Macon, Georgia, Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park, funeral mound. (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
MACON, Ga. – TIME has just named a piece of Georgia history as one of the World’s Greatest Places for 2025.
Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Macon, Georgia was one of just 12 places in the United States to make the magazine’s list.
The backstory:
The mounds, including the Earth Lodge, where indigenous people held council meetings for 1,000 years until their forced removal in the 1820s, were initially protected as a national monument by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
According to the National Parks Service, American Indians constructed the mounds for their elite beginning in 900 CE, creating the structures that remain today.
The site includes a reconstruction of the council chambers of the Mississippian culture, known as the Earth Lodge, and walking trails.
Last year, Georgia’s congressional delegation introduced legislation that would make the area the Peach State’s first national park. The area along the Ocmulgee River downstream from Macon in central Georgia includes mounds and other cultural or historic sites of significance to the Muscogee.
What they’re saying:
To make the list, TIME contributors solicited notations of places from correspondents and contributors that looked at new and exciting experiences around the globe.
In its entry on the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, TIME pointed to the park’s Indigenous past as well as the current work by the city of Macon to install bilingual street signs throughout its Downtown corridor.
TIME also pointed to the upcoming opening of the city’s Otis Redding Center for the Arts and the Macon Bacon Food Trail.
To read more about the park and see the other places on the list, click here.
The Source: Information for this story came from TIME Magazine, Visit Macon, and previous FOX 5 stories.
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Kirk Fordice-like Rick Jackson is sounding a whole lot like Daniel Kirkwood Fordice as he tries to be elected Georgia’s next governor.
Fordice came out of nowhere — actually, Vicksburg is somewhere but you know what I mean — in 1991 to become a two-term Mississippi governor.
He had money but nothing like Jackson, a billionaire businessman who’s also trying to emerge from nowhere politically to win Georgia’s top office.
“The establishment hated Trump, because they couldn’t control him. They are going to hate me,” Jackson says in an ad for Georgia’s Republican Primary on May 19, sounding like one of my favorite Mississippi governors — Fordice, because of his unpredictable personality (he could vilify or charm you, all in one sentence), not his politics. He died in 2004 of cancer.
I stood by a cafe entrance one morning, waiting to cover a Fordice speech. When he appeared, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m not shaking your damn hand. You’re part of the problem down there (referring to the newspaper),” he told me, smiling and moving on.
Jackson rose to become one of economic giant-Georgia’s wealthiest people. He came from Atlanta’s rough midtown area, ending up in the foster care system. He left college due to poor financial circumstances.
The 71-year-old Jackson wormed his way into the dynamic city’s business scene in the late 1970s, mostly of the healthcare variety with mixed success before starting a workforce staffing and services company and later an antibiotics manufacturing plant. He turned those businesses into billion-dollar enterprises.
“It’s God’s money,” he said in rural Blakely, and he’s been charitable with it.
Jackson doesn’t try to hide his vast wealth. His family lives in a 48,000-square-foot mansion at Cumming, a place of nearly 100,000 people near Atlanta in Forsyth County, which once promoted its almost all-white population as a virtue.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy recently wrote that Jackson will spend a ton of his own money in seeking another mansion, the one occupied by Georgia’s governor. Torpy noted that present Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was once heavily favored to win the primary race, but he’s fallen behind Jackson’s bold money bid.
“The one-time front-runner in the Republican primary (Jones) has been relegated to No. 2, the result of a $100 million Mack truck running him over.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare tycoon, a man with a sly smile and reptilian gaze, is the guy driving that truck,” Torpy wrote.
The GOP field includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who spurned Trump’s demand to find 11,780 votes that would’ve allowed him to win Georgia in 2020.
Fordice was effective with some bombastic rhetoric during his run for governor, but I don’t remember it reaching the histrionic level employed by Jackson. In a major ad blitz, often referencing (Georgia college student) Laken Riley’s murderer, Jackson promises that unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes will be “deported or departed … any questions?”
In another ad, Jackson growled, “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians.”
Fordice spent only $1 million to get himself elected Mississippi’s governor. He somewhat sneaked up on the establishment, riding no escalator to the first floor of his Vicksburg concrete river mats-contracting office to declare his intentions. Who could ever forget his announcement seeking the governorship that ran on page 5 of the Clarion Ledger?
Recent polling ahead of Georgia’s May primaries for governor shows the eventual Republican nominee faces a strong Democrat in the November general election, most likely former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That’ll require another whole pot of money.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired Mississippi newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
Gulfstream recently announced a $5 million investment in Georgia education, welcoming students and leaders to its Savannah headquarters.
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