Connesena, a Cherokee name for “winding serpent”, was an early settlement along Connesena Creek and the Etowah River. With the completion of the Western & Atlantic Railroad through Cass County, now Bartow, around 1847, the population shifted to the thriving village of Kingston approximately a mile to the east. Also moved to Kingston was the U.S. Post Office which had been granted Connesena during the prior two years. The Kingston Methodist Church today was once the Connesena Methodist Church, built in 1845 on land donated by neighboring plantation owners Benjamin Reynolds and Andrew Feaster Woolley. Donations for the construction of the original church were collected at the old stagecoach stop at Woolley’s some one mile to the west. Adjacent to the original church was a cemetery where many of the original settlers of Connesena are buried. This church moved and was rebuilt in Kingston in 1854. The Memphis Branch Railroad between Rome, Georgia and the Western & Atlantic Railroad at Kingston was completed in December 1849 through Connesena., however this community’s fate was already sealed. Other than the cemetery, no visible signs of Connesena are left.

Source: History of Bartow County, Georgia, Formerly Cass by Lucy Josephine Cunyus; “Kingston Methodist Church”, May 1993, Etowah Valley Historical Society Newsletter; United States and Worldwide Postal History by Jim Forte.