The county is a major commercial, educational, and manufacturing center of south Georgia with considerable forest products including pulpwood and naval stores, such as turpentine and rosin.

During most of the age of European colonization, the area of modern Lowndes County was part of the colony of Spanish Florida.

On December 15, 1818, European Americans organized what they called Irwin County, which had been settled by pushing out the Creek people.

[3] The county was named for William Jones Lowndes (1782–1822), a prominent South Carolina lawyer and Congressman.

His father Rawlins Lowndes had been a Revolutionary War leader and was elected as South Carolina Governor.

[4] The Coffee Road was an improved trail first cut by Georgia militia to supply federal troops in Florida during the Creek Wars.

The first county seat was established at Franklinville (sometimes spelled Franklynville) by the Georgia General Assembly on December 16, 1828.

In December 1833 the state legislature passed a law establishing a new county seat at a place to be called Lowndesville.

It is uncertain why the plans for Lowndesville were abandoned, but in December 1834, the state legislature authorized commissioners to select a suitable site for a courthouse so that the county seat could be moved away from Franklinville.

Rumors of the coming of the Brunswick and Chattahoochee Railroad, the opening up of Florida, and the prosperity of the surrounding farmland led to the growth of Troupville and Lowndes County in general.

The closest battle to Troupville between Native Americans and whites was at Brushy Creek on November 10, 1836, in modern Berrien County.

General Winfield Scott, commander of United States field forces in the area, intended to stop the Creek movement and did.

Many residents of Lowndes County were unhappy when the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad announced June 17, 1858, that they had selected a planned route that would bypass Troupville.

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.

The arrival of the railroad led to the downfall of Troupville and the rise of Valdosta as a center for the economy of south Georgia.

In that instant some soldiers' wives in Thomasville, Georgia were threatening to break into a Confederate Government Commissary to feed their starving children.

In April 1864 a group of women rioted at Stockton, Georgia after a local store owner refused to take Confederate money in exchange for yarn.

[10] In February 1864 members of Company I "Woodson Guards", 32nd Regiment Georgia Infantry camped overnight in Valdosta at an area south of the railroad while on their way to Battle of Olustee in northern Florida.

[11] In the years right after the Civil War, members of Company "G", 103rd United States Colored Troops were stationed at Valdosta as part of the military occupation of the South during the Reconstruction era.

Several years after the Civil War, 112 African American men, women, and children moved from Lowndes County to Arthington, Liberia in 1871 and 1872.

Some settled there permanently to make their home in a colony established for free American blacks; a small number returned to the United States.

Their emigration was supported by the American Colonization Society, which had been working since the antebellum years to relocate free blacks to this new colony in West Africa.

Mary Turner, the married mother of two young children and eight months pregnant, was brutally murdered in Lowndes County, near Folsom Bridge on the Little River.

[17] Since 2013, the plaque now has as many as 27 bullet holes and more recently, was struck multiple times by “some kind of off-road vehicle,” Mark Patrick George, coordinator for the Mary Turner Project, announced in October 2020.

All of the railroads serving Lowndes County today are freight-only; the closest Amtrak passenger stops are at Folkston and Jesup, both about 100 miles away.