[6] The town was named by returning Mexican–American War inductees who fought at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma (translated Dry River Bed of the Palms) in Brownsville, Texas, in 1846.

Green, who with her own hands gathered and interred the bones and bodies of the Confederate dead left lying on the Resaca Battlefield, should always be sacred to us.

The Green daughters conceived the idea of collecting all the bodies and re-interring them in a plot of land to be known as a Confederate cemetery.

Col. Green gave his daughters 2.5 acres [1.0 ha] of land with rustic bridges spanning the stream through the grounds of their cemetery.

The other is that the word stems from the Spanish resacar ("to retake"), since the primary geological function of a resaca seems to be diversion and dissipation of floodwater from the river.

Vernacular northern Mexican and other Latin American Spanish dialects translate 'resaca' as 'hangover' - undoubtedly referencing the dry cotton-mouth condition the morning after heavy alcohol consumption - as a 'dry river bed.'

Anecdotes abound as to the derivation of the place name, one involving the capture of an Indian maiden by settlers to be offered in marriage to the single man of her choosing.

Since 1977, the Resaca area has been the home of the Monastery of the Glorious Ascension, housed in the former mid-century modern hilltop residence purchased from the late Thurman Chitwood, local entrepreneur and ordained minister in the Church of Christ.

Local detractors, with unfounded fears of casual communicability of AIDS, unsuccessfully sought to have its permitting revoked.

The Resaca Beach Poster Girl Contest,[9] a swimsuit pageant at one time known throughout the South, was founded in the nearby city of Dalton in 1983 as a marketing gimmick of Conquest Carpet Mills, Inc.

The name is tongue-in-cheek, since there is no ocean for hundreds of miles, although it draws reference to a once popular bathing spot on the Oostanaula riverbank commonly deemed Resaca Beach.

The pageant, which launched the career of Whitfield County native Marla Maples, former spouse of real estate magnate Donald Trump, has been held intermittently since the mid-1980s, most recently in 2008.