Happenin’
Places › Georgia › Southwest Georgia

Places to go in Southwest Georgia.

Albany, Plains, Thomasville, Providence Canyon. 4 places worth the drive in this corner of Georgia.

Canyons & desertsAttractions

All places

Everything in Southwest Georgia, by category.

All of Georgia →

4 places

Providence Canyon State Park Canyons & deserts

Providence Canyon State Park

Lumpkin, GA · Southwest Georgia

Sixteen canyons cut into soft Coastal Plain soil here, their walls banded pink, orange, lavender and white from layers of clay and iron, all of it carved in barely 150 years by rainwater running off badly plowed cotton fields. The rim trail looks down into the gorges, then a path drops to the canyon floor where you wade a thin sheet of spring water past 150-foot sand walls. Come in July and August and the rare plumleaf azalea blooms orange-red along the rim, long after every other azalea in the South has gone quiet.

Pasaquan Attractions

Pasaquan

Buena Vista, GA · Southwest Georgia

Beginning in 1957, a self-taught artist who renamed himself St. EOM covered seven acres of rural Marion County in mandalas, totems, and faces, leaving four acres of painted masonry walls, six structures, and a recreated 1885 farmhouse in shades of red, gold, and turquoise. The compound channeled his vision of Pasaquoyanism, a personal cosmology that blended Native American, African, and Asian motifs into one continuous wraparound mural. Columbus State University restored the site with the Kohler Foundation and reopened it in 2016, and it is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lapham-Patterson House Attractions

Lapham-Patterson House

Thomasville, GA · Southwest Georgia

Built in 1885 as a Chicago shoe magnate's winter cottage, this Queen Anne landmark is a National Historic Landmark loaded with deliberate oddities: a deck of fish-scale shingles, walls of stained glass, and close to 50 doors and exits, the legacy of an owner who survived the Great Chicago Fire and never wanted to feel trapped again. The whole house sits slightly askew so equinox light pours through the third floor, and a hexagonal room anchors a floor plan with almost no right angles. Friday and Saturday guided tours walk you through the long-leaf pine inlaid floors and the double-flue chimney that made it a marvel of its day.

Andersonville National Historic Site Attractions

Andersonville National Historic Site

Andersonville, GA · Southwest Georgia

On the ground where Camp Sumter held more than 45,000 Union prisoners in its final fourteen months, a reconstructed stretch of stockade wall and the rows of white headstones at the national cemetery mark where nearly 13,000 men died. The National Prisoner of War Museum carries the story forward to every American who has been held captive, and Providence Spring still runs beneath the 1901 pavilion the survivors built. It is a quiet, heavy place that rewards slow walking and unhurried reading.