Published in 1971, Georgia's Last Frontier presents the history of one of the state's least developed regions. During the 1830s, Carroll County was a large part of Georgia's most rugged frontier. James C. Bonner examines how life in this isolated region was complicated by the presence of Native Americans, cattle rustlers, and horse thieves. He details how the discovery of gold in the Villa Rica area resulted in drunkenness and violence, but also laid the foundations of mining technology that were later used in Colorado and California. The region remained isolated until after the Civil War, when a rail line was constructed to stimulate cotton cultivation. With the development of the railway, Carroll County's frontier traditions waned in the early twentieth century.

This examination of cultural change challenges the conventional view of the Georgia Pine Belt as an unchanging economic backwater. Its postbellum economy evolves from self-sufficiency to being largely dependent upon cotton. Before the Civil War, the Piney Woods easily supported a population of mostly yeomen farmers and livestock herders. After the war, a variety of external forces, spearheaded by Reconstruction-era New South boosters, invaded the region, permanently altering the social, political, and economic landscape in an attempt to create a South with a diversified economy. The first stage in the transformation -- railroad construction and a revival of steamboating -- led to the second stage: sawmilling and turpentining. The harvest of forest products during the 1870s and 1880s created new economic opportunities but left the area dependent upon a single industry that brought deforestation and the decline of the open-range system within a generation.