Biohazard Cleanup Near Grandview Jasper, GA

Jasper is a city in and the county seat of Pickens County, Georgia, at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 60 miles north of Atlanta.

Jasper was founded in 1853 as the seat of the newly created Pickens County, which the legislature carved from parts of Cherokee and Gilmer counties, and county commissioners deliberately chose the county's exact geographic center for the town site.

The town was incorporated on December 22, 1857, and incorporated again as a city in 1957.

Jasper is named for Sergeant William Jasper, an American Revolutionary War hero who was killed during the Siege of Savannah.

Many Pickens County residents opposed secession, and a Union flag was allowed to fly over the courthouse in Jasper for a time even after Georgia left the Union.

The town boomed after the Marietta and North Georgia Railroad arrived in 1883, shipping out local cotton and marble to markets across the state and nation.

Jasper is known as the Marble Capital of Georgia: Pickens County's Georgia marble — including rare pink Etowah marble found in few other places in the world — was used for the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial and for countless monuments and military tombstones.

The Tate House in Jasper was built in the 1920s by marble baron Sam Tate of the Georgia Marble Company, and the Old Pickens County Jail, built in 1906 and faced with marble, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Each fall the city hosts the Georgia Marble Festival during the first full weekend of October, offering tours of the marble quarries along with sculptors, crafts, and mountain music.

Nicknamed "The First Mountain City," Jasper sits at an elevation of 1,463 feet where the Piedmont meets the mountains along Georgia Highway 515.