Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Jakin, GA

Jakin is a small city in southern Early County in southwest Georgia, located in the county's 26th land district near its southernmost end.

Jakin was incorporated in 1895, and its post office had opened four years earlier, in 1891.

According to the town's published history, Jakin's first mayor, James Morris "Major" Bivings, named the town after Jakin, one of the two great columns of Solomon's temple.

Bivings and his partner James W. Duke of Chicago founded the Duke and Bivings Lumber Company, building a mill town complete with worker housing, a commissary and a railway in the longleaf pine forest.

The lumber boom briefly made Jakin a substantial town — according to its published history, the mill employed an estimated 1,000 workers and the population reached about 2,000 by 1903.

The lumber mill closed in 1918, after World War I and the deforestation of the surrounding longleaf pine forests ended the boom.

The 2020 census counted just 131 residents in Jakin, a small remnant of its lumber-boom population.

At the 2000 census, there were 157 people living in 71 households and 42 families in the city.

The Chattahoochee River flows about 3 miles west of Jakin and was historically the area's main transportation route, carrying huge square-cut timbers downstream to Apalachicola, Florida.

Blakely, the Early County seat, is about 21 miles north of Jakin via Jakin Road.