The town was already graced with an abundance of antebellum and Victorian architecture when local capitalists opened the Windsor Hotel in 1892.

Vice-President Thomas R. Marshall gave a speech from the balcony in 1917, and soon to be New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in the dining room in 1928.

Alfred S. Staley was responsible for locating the state Masonic Orphanage in Americus, which served its function from 1898 to 1940.

Both men engineered the unification of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia in 1915, the former as president and the latter as recording secretary.

[8] In World War I, an Army Air Service training facility, Souther Field (now Jimmy Carter Regional Airport), was commissioned northeast of the city limits.

Charles A. Lindbergh, the "Lone Eagle", bought his first airplane and made his first solo flight there during a two-week stay in May 1923.

An angry mob went into the jail and tore down the door to Redding's cell, dragged him out onto Forsyth street, and beat him to death with crow bars and hammers.

A terrorist campaign of violence, intimidation, vandalism, and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and others went on for the next 25 years, as well a boycott of Koinonia's products, such that by the late 1960s the once-thriving community was practically depopulated and essentially defunct.

Miller and Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International at Koinonia in 1976 before moving it into Americus the following year.

[13] The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCCC) organized the peaceful protests and a voter registration drive, the Americus Movement.

A group of African-American girls aged 12 to 15 were arrested in Americus after trying to buy movie tickets at a theatre's whites-only window, as a form of civil protest.

At least fourteen girls were taken to a filthy "hellhole",[14] an isolated prison in Leesburg, Georgia where they were held incommunicado for at least 45 days, in appalling conditions, without right of correspondence or legal representation, and with their families not knowing where they had been or disappeared to.

The publishing of Lyon's photograph in the black press eventually brought the situation to national attention, and the girls were released some weeks later without ever having been charged with any crime.

[15][16][17] In the same year of 1963, the local Sumter Movement to end racial segregation was organized and led by Rev.

A federal court ruled the law unconstitutional, establishing that peaceful protests could not be punishable by execution.

With their election in 1995, Eloise R. Paschal and Eddie Rhea Walker broke the gender barrier on the city's governing body.

It was temporarily relocated to a shirt factory warehouse also located in Americus after the tornado in 2007, but, once the reconstruction of the library finished around 2012, it was moved back to its original place.