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The folks in Henry County - black and white faced a bleak future at the end of the war.
the devastation and disruption in the county was dramatic. Wartime damage caused by Sherman's troops surrounding the fall of Atlanta and the battles of Jonesboro, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned.
Henry County was representative of the postwar difficulties. Property destruction and the deaths of a third of the soldiers caused financial and social crises; recovery was delayed by repeated crop failures. The Freedmen's Bureau agents were unable to give blacks the help they needed.
While the glamorized picture of the reconstruction depicted in "Gone With the Wind" provides some insight, for most of the people the period was a very difficult time and while Henry County did provide lumber for the rebuilding of Atlanta and other agricultural resources, recovery took many years.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_during_Reconstruction