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Chattahoochee is a small city in Gadsden County that began in the 1820s as Mount Vernon, a river-port settlement named for George Washington's Virginia home.

The town was renamed Chattahoochee — a Creek-Muskogee phrase meaning 'marked rocks' — after the U.S. Postal Service kept confusing its mail with Mount Vernon, Alabama.

Chattahoochee was incorporated as a town on January 22, 1834, making it one of the oldest incorporated communities in Florida, and it reincorporated as a city in 1921.

The city sits in the northwest corner of Gadsden County on the Georgia state line, where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers join to form the Apalachicola River.

On January 6, 1861 — four days before Florida formally seceded — state troops seized the federal arsenal at Chattahoochee, one of the opening moves of the Civil War in Florida.

That arsenal went on to become Florida's first state prison in 1868 and then, in 1876, the Florida Asylum for the Indigent Insane — the institution known today as Florida State Hospital.

Florida State Hospital, still the city's dominant institution, was at the center of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case O'Connor v. Donaldson and inspired the 1989 film 'Chattahoochee' starring Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper.

Chattahoochee had 2,955 residents and 845 households at the 2020 census, down sharply from its 1960 peak of 9,699 people, when the state hospital housed far more patients.

Long before Europeans arrived, Mississippian-era people built the ceremonial earthworks now known as the Chattahoochee Landing Mounds near the river.

Locals nicknamed the city 'The Hooch,' and its official motto is 'A Great Place to Live and Retire.'