Macon, Georgia developed around the site after the United States built Fort Benjamin Hawkins nearby in 1806 to support trading with Native Americans.

For thousands of years, succeeding cultures of prehistoric indigenous peoples had settled on what is called the Macon Plateau at the Fall Line, where the rolling hills of the Piedmont met the Atlantic coastal plain.

The monument designation included the Lamar Mounds and Village Site, located downriver about three miles (4.8 km) from Macon.

[6] From Ice Age hunters to the Muscogee Creek tribe of historic times, the site has evidence of 12,000 years of human habitation.

Carrying earth by hand in bags, thousands of workers built the 55 ft (17 m)-high Great Temple Mound on a high bluff overlooking the floodplain of the Ocmulgee River.

[14] The Spaniards left a trail of destruction in their wake as they explored the present-day Southeastern U.S.[citation needed] in a failed search for precious metals.

[16] In 1690, Scottish fur traders from Carolina built a trading post on Ochese Creek (Ocmulgee River), near the Macon Plateau mounds.

Some Muscogee settled nearby, developing a village along the Ocmulgee River near the post, where they could easily acquire trade goods.

The Muscogee traded pelts of white tailed deer and Native American slaves captured in traditional raids against other tribes.

They received West Indian rum, European cloth, glass beads, hatchets, swords, and flintlock rifles from the colonial traders.

Although various development schemes were attempted (silkworm cultivation, production of naval stores), the colony did not become profitable until after Georgia ended its prohibition of slavery.

The founders had intended to provide a colony for hardworking yeomen laborers, but not enough people were willing to immigrate from England and bear its hard conditions.

The colony began to import enslaved Africans as laborers and to develop the labor-intensive rice, cotton and indigo plantations in the 1750s in the Low Country and on the Sea Islands.

These commodity crops, based on slave labor, generated the wealth of the planter class of Georgia and South Carolina.

Because of continuing conflicts with European colonists and other Muscogee groups, many Ochese Creek migrated from Georgia to Spanish Florida in the later 18th century.

There they joined with earlier refugees of the Yamasee War, remnants of Mission Indians, and fugitive slaves, to form a new tribe which became known as the Seminole.

The Lower Creek of Georgia initially had good relations with the federal government of the United States, based on the diplomacy of both Benjamin Hawkins, President George Washington's Indian agent, and the Muscogee Principal Chief Alexander McGillivray.

Under government pressure in 1805, the Lower Creek ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee River to the state of Georgia, but they refused to surrender the sacred mounds.

Many among the Upper Creek wanted to revive traditional culture and religion, and a young group of men, the Red Sticks, formed around their prophets.

McIntosh's influence in the area was extended by his family ties to Georgia's planter elite through his wealthy Scots father of the same name.

In 1821, Chief McIntosh agreed to the first Treaty of Indian Springs, by which the Lower Creek ceded their lands east of the Flint River, including Ocmulgee Old Fields, to the United States.

William McIntosh and a Muscogee delegation from the National Council went to Washington to protest the treaty to President John Quincy Adams.

The Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and most of the Seminole, known as the Five Civilized Tribes, were all removed from the Southeast to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

[21] While the mounds had been studied by some travelers, professional excavation under the evolving techniques of archeology did not begin until the 1930s, under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

Workers excavated portions of eight mounds, finding an array of significant archeological artifacts that revealed a wide trading network and complex, sophisticated culture.

In 1997, the NPS designated Ocmulgee Old Fields as a Traditional Cultural Property, the first such site named east of the Mississippi River.

The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed March 12, 2019, redesignated it as a national historical park and increased its size by about 2,100 acres.

The Lamar Mounds and Village Site is an isolated unit of the park, located in the swamps about 3 miles (4.8 km) south of Macon.

In 2022, the NPS conducted a Special Resource Study on the Ocmulgee River Corridor,[26] which could have recommended expansion of the area as a national park and preserve.

[31] Despite the study's findings and recommendations, Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and Representatives Sanford Bishop and Austin Scott, whose districts covered the Ocmulgee River watershed in question, announced their intent to support the intended expansion.