Cornelia was the retirement home of baseball legend Ty Cobb who was born nearby, and was a base of operation for production of the 1956 Disney film The Great Locomotive Chase that was filmed along the Tallulah Falls Railway that ran from Cornelia northward along the rim of Tallulah Gorge to Franklin, North Carolina.

Cornelia is located in southern Habersham County and is bordered to the east by Mount Airy and to the southwest by Baldwin.

[6] Cornelia was originally called "Blaine", and under the latter name had its start in the early 1870s when the Charlotte Airline Railroad was extended to that point.

After the Fall of Atlanta, a detachment of William Tecumseh Sherman's cavalry was sent to raid the county; but the Confederate Home Guard, made up of men too old for military duty, left the mountains on which Cornelia is situated and met the Union soldiers at a narrow pass about four miles east of the town.

By making considerable noise and stirring up clouds of smoke, they scared off the Union soldiers and saved the area from complete devastation.

[citation needed] In the early days, the school system was owned and operated by the town of Cornelia.

According to the document published by the Habersham County Department of Education in 1937, Professor Booth added a training course for teachers, and students were attracted to this school from all sections of northeast Georgia (p. 21).

[citation needed] German and Swiss immigrants used their wine-making skills to create an industry in the 1880s that flourished until a prohibition law stopped it.

Cotton, timber and lumber products, and the apple and peach industries were also important to the success of the area.

Built of steel and concrete in 1925, the statue, according to Habersham County, weighs 5,200 pounds (2.4 t) and is 7 feet (2.1 m) high.

Towards the end of World War I, "extension agents" began to play a very important role in northeast Georgia.

The extension agents' push for this diversity seemed almost prescient, for in 1922 the boll weevil began the systematic destruction of cotton crops in the state of Georgia.

In 1925 the people of Cornelia realized that the apple had been a key in preventing the scourge that destroyed other counties and drove rural families to cities like Atlanta and Macon.

As the railroad era passed the old depot was closed and boarded up, and the once central location was only a side street.