24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Fitzgerald, GA

Fitzgerald is a city in south-central Georgia and the county seat of Ben Hill County, and it is the only incorporated city in the county.

Fitzgerald has one of the most unusual founding stories in America: it was founded in 1895 by Philander H. Fitzgerald, an Indianapolis pension attorney and former Union Army drummer boy, as a retirement colony in the warm South for aging Union Civil War veterans.

Settlers flocked to the colony from 38 states and two territories, Fitzgerald was incorporated on December 2, 1896, and Confederate veterans joined their former enemies in building the town, earning it the nicknames 'The Colony City' and Georgia's 'Yank-Reb City.'

In a lasting symbol of reconciliation, Fitzgerald's grid of streets honors generals of both armies — seven west-side streets named for Confederate leaders such as Lee and Jackson, and seven east-side streets named for Union leaders such as Grant and Meade.

Fitzgerald had 9,006 residents at the 2020 census, essentially unchanged from 9,053 in 2010, while Ben Hill County as a whole had 17,194 residents.

Ben Hill County was organized in 1906 from Irwin and Wilcox counties and named for Benjamin Harvey Hill, a U.S. Senator from Georgia, with Fitzgerald designated its seat from the start.

Fitzgerald is famous for its free-roaming wild chickens, descended from Burmese jungle fowl released by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources near the Ocmulgee River in the 1960s as an experimental game bird; the flock migrated into town and is now a protected local emblem.

Every March the city celebrates its feathered residents with the Wild Chicken Festival in its downtown historic district.

The Blue and Gray Museum in Fitzgerald tells the colony's story and displays Civil War artifacts, including a Medal of Honor and the Confederate flag that draped the coffin of Georgia's last surviving Confederate veteran, a Fitzgerald resident.

Fitzgerald is one of Georgia's few fully planned cities, laid out on a Midwestern-style grid by the American Tribune Soldiers' Colony Company, which bought some 50,000 acres, later expanded to about 100,000 acres, for the settlement.