Madison is a city in Morgan County, Georgia, United States. It is part of the Atlanta-Athens-Clarke-Sandy Springs Combined Statistical Area. The population was 4,447 at the 2020 census, up from 3,979 in 2010. The city is the county seat of Morgan County and the site of the Morgan County Courthouse. The Madison Historic District is one of the largest in the state. Many of the nearly 100 antebellum homes have been carefully restored. Bonar Hall is one of the first of the grand-style Federal homes built in Madison during the town's cotton-boom heyday from 1840 to 1860. Budget Travel magazine voted Madison as one of the world's 16 most picturesque villages. Madison is featured on Georgia's Antebellum Trail, and is designated as one of the state's Historic Heartland cities. History Early 19th century On December 12, 1809, the town, named for 4th United States president, James Madison, was incorporated. Madison was described in an early 19th-century issue of White's Statistics of Georgia as "the most cultured and aristocratic town on the stagecoach route from Charleston to New Orleans." An 1849 edition of White's Statistics stated, "In point of intelligence, refinement, and hospitality, this town acknowledges no superior." While many believe that William Tecumseh Sherman spared the town because it was too beautiful to burn during his March to the Sea, the truth is that Madison was home to pro-Union Congressman (later Senator) Joshua Hill. Hill had ties with General Sherman's brother in the House of Representatives, so his sparing the town was more political than appreciation of its beauty. Jim Crow era In 1895 Madison was reported to have an oil mill with a capital of $35,000, a soap factory, a fertilizer factory, four steam ginneries, a mammoth compress, two carriage factories, a furniture factory, a grist and flouringmill, a bottling works, a distillery with a capacity of 120 gallons a day, an ice factory with a capital of $10,500, a canning factory with a capital of $10,000, a bank with a capital of $75,000, surplus $12,000, and a number of small industries operated by individual enterprise. One of the carriage factories was owned and operated by prominent African-American businessman and entrepreneur H. R. Goldwire. Against the backdrop of this Jim Crow-era prosperity, white Madisonians participated in at least three documented lynchings of African Americans. In February 1890, after a rushed trial involving knife-wielding jurors, Brown Washington, a 15-year-old, was