It all started with Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, a site that has been inhabited by indigenous groups for 17,000 years. The Mississippian people built elaborate mounds around 900 CE that still stand today and have become a source of sightseeing.
These mounds also happen to be minutes from downtown Macon.
There is an effort to make Ocmulgee into a national park, a first for the state. (Georgia has a number of National Park Service-recognized monuments, historic sites and battlefields, but no official national parks.) That caused the Macon-Bibb Urban Development Authority, a group of county-appointed experts, to turn its eye toward developing an existing entrance to the park that lies in the Fort Hawkins neighborhood.