The minister of Charleston's Congregational Church, Jedidiah Morse, was a renowned gazetteer. In the 1812 edition of his “American Universal Geography,” or a “View of the Present State of all the Kingdoms, States, and Colonies in the Known World,” Bulloch County makes its first appearance. Morse, the father of Samuel Morse, who invented “Morse Code” wrote that the population of the new Bulloch County in 1810 was 2,305 people, of whom 1,879 were free and 426 were slaves.