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is a city in Laurens County, Georgia, United States. The population was 15,857 at the 2000 census. By 2005 the population is estimated to be 16,924. The city is the county seat of Laurens County.
Because of Dublin's location as a midpoint between Savannah and Atlanta, the town in recent decades became home to a small assortment of industrial distribution centers, which complemented various industries -- textiles, furniture, and paper, among others -- that had already established themselves there in the second half of the 20th century. Historically, however, Dublin's economy was based on the local cotton, corn, and soybean trades, which blossomed as the town's central location enabled it to thrive with the growth of the railroad.
Originally, Dublin and the surrounding area was home to Native Americans of the Muskogee people, also known as Creek peoples. Like their brethren throughout much of the southeast, most of the Muskogee fled westward with the arrival of European settlers, many of them organizing themselves into armed resistance units, which fought government forces and white militias to protect their native territory well into the early 1800s. Ultimately, most of the Muskogee diaspora settled in what is now Oklahoma.
Despite the Irish ancestry of Dublin's first non-indigenous settlers, the town, like most of Middle Georgia, by the late 1800s had evolved into a hodgepodge of mixed ethnicities. Area whites descended from Scottish, English, and other western European immigrants. The considerable African-American population descended from freed slaves, most of whose roots lay in Angola or elsewhere in west Africa. By the end of the 20th century, the town had also become home to a growing population of recent immigrants, many of them professionals from India, Korea, and Latin America. As labor migrations from Mexico and Central America shifted from the southwest U.S. to much of the southeast, many immigrants from those regions also moved to Dublin in the first decade of the 21st century.
Dublin, according to a historical marker at the town's main Oconee bridge, was one of the last encampments at which Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his family stayed before being captured by Union forces in May 1865.
The town, along with a reference to the Oconee river and Laurens County, is mentioned in the opening paragraph of James Joyce's
: "nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time." (Joyce explained in a letter: "Dublin, Laurens Co, Georgia, founded by a Dubliner, Peter Sawyer, on r. Oconee. Its motto: Doubling all the time.")