1 Chatham Academy chartered in Savannah in 1788.

Journalist Merriman Smith was born in Savannah 1913. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

2 Poet and novelist James Dickey was born in Atlanta in 1923.

Howard Helmer set a world record by cooking 427 two-egg omelettes in only 30 minutes in 1990.

3 Poet Sidney Lanier was born in Macon in 1842.

In 1993, U.S. Swim, the best-organized swimming program in the nation, announed that it would move its National Development Center to Georgia Tech.

6 John Brown Gordon, governor of Georgia from 1886 to 1890 and former Confederate general, was born in Upson County in 1832.

Actor Ben Lyon, star of numerous Hollywood silents and early talkies, was born in Atlanta in 1901.

In 1988, Mercer beat Georgia State when Georgia fans tossed rolls of toilet paper onto the basketball court causing two technical fouls.

8 Georgia joined the Confederacy in 1861.

Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield National Park was added to the National Park System in 1917.

Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker was born in Eatonton in 1944.

9 John Milledge, governor of Georgia from 1802 to 1806, died in 1818.

David Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969, was born in Cherokee County in 1909.

10 Grace Towns Hamilton, the first African-American woman to serve in the Georgia legislature, was born in Atlanta in 1907.

Henry O. Flipper's remains were reinterred with full military honors at Old Magnolia Cemetery in Thomasville in 1978.

11 Alexander Hamilton Stephens, vice president of the COnfederate States and governor of Georgia, was born near Crawfordville in 1812.

Actor Burt Reynolds was born in Waycross in 1936.

12 In 1733, James Oglethorpe landed at Yamacraw Bluff and founded Savannah, the birthplace of the Georgia colony.

15 Famous Yazoo land fraud papers were burned in front of the courthouse in Louisville in 1796.

17 Football running back Jim Brown was born on St. Simons Island in 1936.

18 Bill Miner conducted his last train robbery a few miles from White Sulphur Springs in 1911.

19 Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was born in Columbus in 1917.

Actor Jeff Daniels, who starred in the films Terms of Endearment and Ragtime, was born in Atlanta in 1955.

Gamma the chimpanzee died at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta in 1992.

20 Barnesville, "Buggy Capital of the World," was incorporated in 1854.

Georgia's first intercollegiate football game was played in Athens in 1892.

In 1974, J. Reginald Murphy, an editor at the Atlanta Constitution, was kidnapped at gunpoint and released 49 hours later.

22 Clothing store Jos Neel Co. in Macon placed its first advertisement in the Macon Telegraph newspaper in 1889.

John Hope, the first African-American president of Morehouse College, died in Atlanta in 1936.

23 Running back Herschel Walker announced that he was leaving the University of Georgia to play professional football in 1983.

25 The Georgia legislature set aside 40,000 acres of public land to endow the state's first university in 1784.

Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, died in Chicago, Illinois in 1975.

Painter and art educator Alma Thomas died in 1978.

27 Actress Joanne Woodward was born in Thomasville in 1930.

Martha McChesney Berry, founder of Mount Berry School in Rome, died in 1942.

Wayne Bertram Williams was convicted of two of the Atlanta child murders and receiived two consecutive life sentences in 1982.

28 Georgia became the first state to establish a state department of agriculture in 1874.

Singer and composer Joe South was born in Atlanta in 1940.

John Clark, governor of Georgia from 1819 to 1823, was born in Edgecomb County, North Carolina in 1766.