IN A SENSE, BALDWIN COUNTY’S JOB STILL HASN’T RECOVERED GREAT RECESSION
To say that Baldwin County's labor market has changed quite a bit in the last 20-something years would be, well, a very large understatement. There's been the Great Recession, the dismantling of Central State Hospital, four prison closings, a crisis in American manufacturing, and, more recently, a global pandemic.
Each has shifted the dynamics of how people in Baldwin County go to work and make money.
In the last 22 years, for example, Baldwin County has lost more than half of its state government jobs, as well as roughly 75 percent of its manufacturing jobs, according to Georgia Department of Labor (DOL) data.
For this article, the DOL's industry mix data was taken from the third quarter of 2025, which is the most recent data available for Baldwin County, and compared to the industry mix from 2003.
Baldwin County was clobbered especially hard after the Great Recession. The state of Georgia, facing declining revenues, austerity cuts and a budget crisis, decided to consolidate prisons and close some old ones, including four on the southside of Milledgeville. First up was Rivers State Prison in the summer of 2008, which put roughly 300 people out of work.
Then came Scott State Prison in the summer of 2009, which equaled another 250-300 job losses. Bostick Prison then closed in 2010 and Men's State Prison the following year.
The other big blow to Baldwin County's state government job sector, of course, was the drastic downsizing of Central State Hospital.
Today, all that remains of Central State is the Cook Building, which houses individuals deemed by a court as “mentally unfit to stand trial,” as well as some administrative jobs at the Allen Building.
Piece by piece, building by building, entire units at Central State eventually were shut down and employees laid off en masse.
At the time, “community settings” were all the rage around the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, and group homes supposedly were the magic bullet for mental health in Georgia. The DOJ sued the state of Georgia, and the state ultimately agreed to begin emptying out its mental hospitals and finding community settings for all of its developmentally disabled clients. The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, back when it held more powers of persuasion than it does now, also was influential in Central State's downsizing, writing a series of damning articles about Central State and Georgia’s other mental health hospitals.
The AJC then came over the top with several flattering articles about group homes and their benefits.
To its credit, several years later, the AJC published a series of in-depth articles on group homes and serious problems at group homes, writing that “the newspaper found, many (clients) appear to be no better off — or, in some cases, even worse off — now than when they lived in the state’s dangerous and dysfunctional psychiatric facilities.”
While the Central State campus was being boarded up, three different factories shut down around town, including Rheem Manufacturing, which packed up and moved to Mexico in 2011.
In terms of private employers, Rheem had been Baldwin County's cornerstone since the late 1970s.
The end result is that Baldwin County now has roughly 3,000 fewer total jobs than it did 20 years ago. It would be even worse without increases in the healthcare and social service sector and the accomodation and food service sector. In 2003, there were 2,139 jobs in the healthcare and social service sector in Baldwin County, according to the DOL's data. Most recently, there were 3,821. In 2002, there were 1,584 jobs in accommodations and food services, according to the DOL, and in the third quarter of 2025 there were 2,150.
All totaled, there were 11,069 service producing jobs in Baldwin County in the third quarter of 2025, which compares to 8,166 back in 2003.
A total of 2,777 state government jobs remain in Baldwin County, which is overwhelmingly represented by three entities; the Baldwin County School District, Georgia College & State University, and Georgia Military College.
So, in that sense, Milledgeville is still a state government town, although not nearly to the extent that it was previously. In 2003, for example, Baldwin County was home to more than 6,000 state government jobs.
In terms of the manufacturing data, in 2003, there were 33 'firms' employing 3,193 people in the 'manufacturing' sector in Baldwin County, which compares to 21 firms and 802 manufacturing jobs in the third quarter of 2025.