In 1801, George Sibbald of Augusta donated an 9,301-acre tract for a centrally located county seat for the growing agricultural community of Bulloch County. In December 1803, the Georgia legislature created the town of Statesborough. In 1866 the state legislature granted a permanent charter and changed the spelling of the name to its present form, Statesboro.   During the Civil War and General William T. Sherman's famous march to the sea, a union officer asked a saloon proprietor for directions to Statesboro. The proprietor replied, "You are standing in the middle of town." The soldiers destroyed only the courthouse—a crude log structure that doubled as a barn when court was not in session. After the Civil War, the city began to grow and Statesboro emerged as a major town in southeastern Georgia. Around the turn of the century, new stores and banks sprang up along the town's four major streets, each named Main. In 1908 Statesboro led the world in sales of long-staple Sea Island Cotton. For each bale of cotton sold in Savannah, ten bales were sold in Statesboro. After the boll weevil decimated the cotton crop in the 1930s, farmers shifted to tobacco. By 1953 more than 20 million pounds of tobacco passed through warehouses in Statesboro, which was then the largest market in the "bright Tobacco Belt" spanning Georgia and Florida. In 1906, when the state of Georgia announced it would fund an agricultural and mechanical school in Georgia's First Congressional District, more than 100 Statesboro-Bulloch County residents and supporters successfully lobbied for Statesboro as the ideal location, outbidding several other communities. The school continued to grow in the following decades and eventually became Georgia Southern University, a comprehensive research university with more than 19,000 students. The area surrounding Georgia Southern University was once called Collegeboro, but was never incorporated and eventually Statesboro grew outward encompassing "Collegeboro" and the university.     Mostly from Wikipedia (09-04-11)