If you walk, run, or bike the Man O' War Trail with any regularity, you already know the shape of it. Roughly 13.4 miles of ten-foot-wide asphalt running from the Chipley area down through downtown Pine Mountain, past Hood and the Callaway Country Store, into Hamilton Square, and on to South Hamilton before it ends at Mulberry Creek in Cataula. What you may not know is that the money paying for the next stretch of that trail is coming from a completely different place than the money that built the last two sections, and that switch explains both why progress looks slower right now and why this next phase is more likely to actually get finished.
The trail runs on the old footprint of a real train. The Man O' War was a diesel line established by the Central of Georgia Railway in 1947, connecting Columbus to Atlanta and stopping daily in Pine Mountain for more than twenty years. The tracks kept hauling freight long after the passenger runs ended, and the line wasn't fully decommissioned until 2007. What's under your feet or your tires on a Saturday morning is that same rail bed, repaved and repurposed.
Two Fast Phases, Paid in Cash the County Already Had
The two most recent extensions moved quickly because Harris County was spending money it had already collected. Phase V, a 5.4-mile stretch from the Callaway Country Store to the south side of Hamilton, was bid out in the spring of 2022. Piedmont Paving of Newnan won the contract at $1,365,074.35, funded through the county's T-SPLOST transportation sales tax, and the segment opened by late November of that year, bringing the trail to 10 miles total.
Phase VI followed the same playbook. Starting just south of Hamilton across from the old Carver School on U.S. 27, it added three more miles down to Mulberry Creek. Robinson Paving completed the work for $1.14 million, again paid out of TSPLOST funds, and the trail reached its current length not long after.
Both phases moved from bid to ribbon-cutting in under a year because the county already had the cash sitting in its transportation fund. There was no waiting on an outside agency to approve, award, or reimburse anything.
Phase 7 Runs on a Different Kind of Money
That's not how the next phase is being paid for. Instead of drawing on local sales tax dollars already in hand, Harris County went after a Georgia Department of Transportation Transportation Investment Act award, the kind of grant that funds regional infrastructure rather than neighborhood amenities. County staff first reported a $5 million TIA award for the trail in the summer of 2025. By October, the county had formalized a GDOT agreement providing up to $5 million in reimbursement against an estimated total phase cost of $6.63 million, leaving a gap the county is working to close through additional grants, including support from the River Valley Regional Commission.
By the time commissioners sat down for the FY2026-27 budget hearings in June, the number under discussion had grown to roughly $6 million, and staff confirmed it as reimbursable. That word matters more than it sounds like it should. Reimbursable means the county has to spend the money first and submit invoices before the state pays it back, rather than having the full grant sitting in an account ready to write checks against. It's why the newly adopted FY2026-27 budget only earmarks about $600,000 of construction spending for calendar 2027, even though the total award is ten times that.
County Manager Clark Harrell told commissioners this summer that engineering on the phase was nearly finished, saying:
"We're about 80 percent complete with the engineering."
He added that the bid process could open this fall, which puts the next visible sign of progress, an actual construction contract, somewhere in the coming months rather than years out. Given how state-funded reimbursement grants typically move, a fall 2026 bid opening likely means a 2027 construction window, which lines up with the budget already earmarking work for that year.
What You Can Actually Walk Today
None of this changes what's already open. The current 13.4-mile trail is fully usable, and every trailhead has a kiosk with an updated map showing mile markers, elevation, restrooms, and parking. Running north to south, those trailheads are:
- Chipley and Downtown Pine Mountain, the trail's northern anchors
- Hood, a quieter midpoint stop
- Callaway Country Store, where Phase V originally started
- Hamilton Square, right in the county seat
- South Hamilton, the launch point for the newer stretch down to Mulberry Creek
The path is ten feet wide, paved, and open to runners, cyclists, and dog walkers. E-bikes are welcome. Motorized vehicles are not.
It's worth putting the funding shift in context, because the trail isn't the only recreation line item the county touched this budget cycle. The same FY2026-27 hearings that confirmed the trail's reimbursable state grant also raised rental rates at Eldersley Park Lodge by roughly 20 to 25 percent, pushing in-county day rentals to about $250 and out-of-county rentals to $565 to $600. Some facilities are getting more expensive to use locally while a much larger outside grant is funding the county's biggest recreation build. That's not a contradiction so much as a sign of how the county is sequencing its priorities this year: raise a little locally on facilities that already exist, and lean on state transportation dollars for the project that extends the trail network everyone already uses.
If you're out on the trail this fall, the kiosks at Hamilton Square and South Hamilton are the ones worth watching. Once that bid opens, they're the trailheads closest to where the next phase will begin.
We follow this kind of local detail because it's the texture of actually living here, not just passing through. If you've got trail tips of your own, or you're weighing a move somewhere along the Man O' War corridor, Move With Mia would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.