Wheeler County is a county located in the central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 7,471. The county seat is Alamo. The county is one of the most impoverished counties in the nation. The American Community Survey's 2009–2013 average reports that the county's per-capita income of $8,948 makes it the poorest county in the United States by this metric. The measurement however is misleading as Wheeler County is the site of Wheeler Correctional Facility, a large prison with a capacity of 2,874 prisoners, about 40 percent of the county's total population. Most prisoners have little income. The prison was opened in 1998 and the prison population may also account for the increased population of the county in the early 2000s.

Joseph "Fighting Joe" Wheeler was a military commander and politician of the Confederate States of America. He was a cavalry general in the Confederate States Army in the 1860s during the American Civil War, and then a general in the United States Army during both the Spanish-American and Philippine–American Wars near the turn of the twentieth century. For much of the Civil War, he was the senior cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee and fought in most of its battles in the Western Theater.