[2] Union County was originally a core part of the homeland of the native Cherokee tribe.

Mountainous and formerly one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Georgia, the area became the object of desire for white settlers with the discovery of gold in the 1820s.

[3] The newcomers formed political groups to force the Cherokee off their land, part of the removal of most of the southeastern native tribes in what is known as the Trail of Tears.

The Cherokee nation and roughly 1,600 of their black slaves were forced west to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the then Western United States.

The Union Party was a political group that supported removing the Indians and opening the area to white settlers, and is the probable reason for the county's name.

[5] As a mountainous region not suited to plantation farming and settled by hardscrabble, independent farmers, Union County had relatively few slaves compared to other areas of Georgia.

The white population of Union County residents were largely pro-Union in the years prior to the Civil War, with sentiments against the plantation-owning aristocratic elites in the lowland sections of the state, as was true of much of Georgia's mountainous north and the Appalachian region in general.

When the state seceded and when Lincoln raised a Union army to suppress the rebellion, most Union County residents supported the Confederacy and most of the soldiers from the county fought on the Confederate side either as enlistees or, after the Confederate draft of 1862, as draftees.

[4] Joseph E. Brown, the wartime governor of Georgia, was a resident of Union County, having moved there from western South Carolina.

After the war, railroad lines were built that linked Union County to other areas, including Gainesville and Culberson, North Carolina, giving farmers expanded distribution.

The first paved road in Union County was completed in 1926 and ran from Cleveland to the North Carolina border.

The central and northern portion of Union County is located in the Hiwassee River sub-basin of the Middle Tennessee-Hiwassee basin, while the southwestern portion of the county is located in the Ocoee River sub-basin of the same larger watershed.

[25] (Because American Indians were forced out, and black slavery was virtually nonexistent in this part of the Georgia mountains, the county has had a minuscule nonwhite population for almost 200 years.)