The Taliaferro County Courthouse sits on the square at the centre of Crawfordville and dates from 1902. It is a modestly scaled brick building in a county that has seen its population decline dramatically since the early 20th century — Taliaferro County now has fewer than 1,500 people, making it one of the least populous counties in the eastern United States.
The courthouse square is the kind of main street that has largely disappeared elsewhere in the South: quiet, anchored by a working civic building, with a handful of old commercial structures around it. Crawfordville was named for William Crawford, former US Secretary of the Treasury and one-time presidential candidate, whose political star briefly rivalled Andrew Jackson's. A few historical markers around the square note the town's connections to Georgia Reconstruction-era politics.