Before Gwinnett County became today’s connected community, it was forested land where Cherokee and Creek people lived and hunted. Early settlers raised subsistence crops such as corn, but from 1800 through the Civil War cotton produced by slave labor was the county’s main product. After the war, freedmen and poor whites relied on sharecropping to survive. The boll weevil’s arrival in 1920 destroyed the county’s main cash crop and ended cotton’s dominance in Gwinnett. New Deal farm programs brought further changes as farmers adopted new techniques and other crops. During the 20th century, Gwinnett farmers diversified into dairy, poultry, and farm equipment, and the county’s large, fairly flat tracts of land also suited industrial farms and distribution centers. In Duluth, Minor Corley operated a store selling Allis Chalmers tractors to local farmers. After Buford Dam was built in the 1950s, Gwinnett began managing natural resources more proactively through soil and water conservation.