About the Bandy Center

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia is a research archives, heritage preservation resource, and community outreach initiative of Dalton State College.

Our Mission

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia collects, preserves, and interprets the material and cultural histories of Northwest Georgia’s many communities.

Our Vision

Through archival collection, artifact preservation, museum exhibition, scholarly research, and heritage programming, the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia strives to ignite curiosity about the past, spark conversation in the present, and inspire the future by articulating and making accessible a compelling, equitable, and inclusive vision for community identity and memory.

Land Acknowledgment

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia acknowledges the Cherokee people whose lives, lifeways, knowledge, and culture thrived in the ridges and valleys of our region. Between May 1838 and March 1839, more than 15,000 Cherokee inhabitants of Georgia were forcibly removed from and dispossessed of this land, and we mourn the deaths of the approximately 6,000 men, women, and children who died on the 1,200-mile march westward now called the Trail of Tears. The Bandy Heritage Center seeks to honor the Cherokee Nation and earlier indigenous caretakers of this land, and to honor Dicksie Bandy’s own efforts to raise awareness of the means by which Northwest Georgia’s current inhabitants came to call this place home.