[2] The county was created in 1858 from portions of Lowndes and Thomas counties by an act of the Georgia General Assembly and was named for pro-slavery U.S. Representative Preston Brooks, after he severely beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner with a cane for delivering a speech attacking slavery.

Historic Native peoples occupying the area at the time of European encounter were the Apalachee and the Lower Creek.

On June 22 at 3:00 am, the Lowndes County courthouse at Troupville was set aflame by William B. Crawford, who fled to South Carolina after being released on bond.

He was very popular in the South because of his 1856 caning of abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and the citizens of Georgia wanted to honor him.

The county had been developed along the waterways for cotton plantations, dependent on enslaved laborers, many of whom were transported to the South in the domestic slave trade during the Antebellum years.

Cotton brought a high return from local and international markets, making large planters wealthy.

In August 1864, a local white man named John Vickery began plotting a slave rebellion.

Following the war and the Reconstruction era, Brooks County was one of the areas with a high rate of racial violence by whites against blacks.

As many as 500 African Americans fled Lowndes and Brooks counties to escape future violence.

In 2010, a state historical marker, encaptioned "Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage," was installed at Folsom's Bridge in Lowndes County to commemorate these atrocities.

This section presently consists of one parcel, recorded as 350 acres (1.4 km2), although it has a border with Florida of almost 2 miles (3.2 km).

The county is home to several endangered plant and animal species, including the Pond Spicebush, the Wood Stork, and the Eastern Indigo snake.

Most of the southern edge of the county is located in the Aucilla River sub-basin of the larger Aucilla-Waccasassa basin.

Racially and ethnically, as a result of the demand for slave labor to work the cotton plantations, the county was majority black from before the American Civil War well into the 20th century.

Starting in the early 1900s, hundreds of blacks left the county in the Great Migration to northern and midwestern industrial cities to gain better opportunities and escape the oppressive Jim Crow conditions, including the highest rate of lynchings of blacks in Georgia from 1880 to 1930.

Brooks County also offers excellent fishing in its many lakes and streams, which are open to the public.

Route 10 is 246 miles (396 km) long and goes from Lake Seminole in the west to Jekyll Island in the east.