The area that is now Randolph County lay within the vast territory in Georgia and Alabama once claimed by the Creeks, with several small Creek towns there in the late 1700s and early 1800s, including nearby Oketeyoconne and smaller settlements in the county’s western portion affiliated with Eufaula. Randolph County traces its origins to the creation of Lee County in 1826 after the Creeks ceded much of western Georgia, and Randolph was formed from western Lee in 1828 and named for John Randolph of Virginia. From its original limits came Quitman, Stuart, Webster, and parts of Clay and Terrell counties. Although isolated missionary outposts appeared as early as 1823, most of the first American settlers were eastern Georgians who obtained former Creek lands through the land lottery of 1827, which awarded property to qualifying citizens by chance based on family size, military service, and other factors. In 1830, when Georgia created Stewart County, Cuthbert was planned as the centrally located county seat of Randolph County. Surveyors laid out the town in 1831 with boundaries extending in a circular half-mile from the courthouse lot at the center of the modern town square. The first courthouse was built there in the 1830s, a second followed in the early 1840s on the same site, log structures dominated the early town, and the first frame buildings did not appear until the late 1830s. Cuthbert was incorporated in 1834, had a population of about 2,000 by 1856, and was named for Georgia politician and Judge John A. Cuthbert, a Savannah native who served several terms in the Georgia Legislature, one term in the United States Congress, and later worked as a judge in Alabama. The area’s role as a crossroads long predated the town, notably through the Seminole War Path, opened in 1818 by American militia at the outbreak of the First Seminole War to connect Fort Perry on the Old Federal Road with Fort Gaines on the Chattahoochee River, and by the 1850s Cuthbert had become an important crossing point for numerous regional roads.