Macon ( ), officially Macon–Bibb County, is a consolidated city-county in the U.S. state of Georgia. Situated near the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, it is southeast of Atlanta and near the state’s geographic center — hence its nickname "The Heart of Georgia.” Macon’s population was 157,346 in 2020. It is the principal city of the Macon Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had 234,802 people in 2020. It also is the largest city in the Macon–Warner Robins Combined Statistical Area (CSA), which had approximately 420,693 residents in 2017 and abuts the Atlanta metropolitan area to the northwest. Voters approved the consolidation of the City of Macon and Bibb County governments in a 2012 referendum. Macon became the state’s fourth-largest city after Augusta when the merger occurred January 1, 2014. Macon is served by three interstate highways: I-16 (connecting to Savannah and coastal Georgia), I-75 (connecting to Atlanta to the north and Valdosta to the south), and I-475 (a city bypass highway). The area has two airports: Middle Georgia Regional Airport and Herbert Smart Downtown Airport. The city has several institutions of higher education and numerous museums and tourism sites. History Macon was founded on the site of the Ocmulgee Old Fields, where the Creek Indians lived in the 18th century. Their predecessors, the Mississippian culture, built a powerful agriculture-based chiefdom (950–1100 AD). The Mississippian culture constructed earthwork mounds for ceremonial, religious, and burial purposes. Indigenous peoples inhabited the areas along the Southeast’s rivers for 13,000 years before Europeans arrived. Macon was developed at the site of Fort Benjamin Hawkins, built in 1809 at President Thomas Jefferson’s direction after he forced the Creek to cede their lands east of the Ocmulgee River (Archeological excavations in the 21st century found evidence of two separate fortifications.) The fort was named for Benjamin Hawkins, who served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southeast territory south of the Ohio River for more than 20 years, had lived among the Creek, and was married to a Creek woman. Located at the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, the fort established a trading post with Native peoples at river’s most inland point navigable from the Low Country. Fort Hawkins guarded the Lower Creek Pathway, an extensive and well-traveled American Indian network that the U.S. government later improved as the Federal Road, linking Washington, D.C., to the ports of Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana. Used for