Immigrants All

A beautiful day in Southeast Georgia today.  But not warm enough for the beach, so we went 20 miles north to Darien, one of the several original towns of the Georgia Colony settled by James Oglethorpe. Like the one we’re living in, Brunswick, it was originally designed on the ‘Oglethorpe Plan’, with many parks in close proximity. Two still exist.

Darien was founded in 1736, but before Oglethorpe there were the English Coastal Scouts. And before them the Spanish, and before any Europeans there were the Guale Indians. And even they were immigrants from another continent some long time back.

Our first stop was the first known area of settlement, at the tip of the peninsula Darien lies on, where the Black and Altamaha Rivers meet. The Guale had a village here, though Indians probably had villages at every logical place to plant a community in Georgia.

  

Next came the Spanish, though archaeologists have found only small evidence of a mission church.

Then the English came south from Carolina to build one of several forts to keep more Spanish from showing up to contest the English claims to Georgia.  The French never tried to claim this area at all.

The fort was called George, for King George the First, on the throne in the 1720’s and the monarch who sent a regiment of retired soldiers (40ish aged men) from England to settle here.  But first they had to build a fort and homes in and around it to protect themselves.

The original site of the fort lies archaeologically investigated and now protected under the present visitor center. The current Fort George is as exact a replica of the original as could be built.  Using the original plans and several contemporary drawings a visitor can now go back in time.  And if they come on a re-enactment weekend, they will feel they are really back in time.

Though the Spanish never attacked the fort, they did harass it a few times, and the Guale Indians came to dislike the English here for many of the same reasons Indians came to dislike Euro settlers everywhere in America. So protection was a first priority for the English.

We had an interesting conversation with the park ranger in the visitor center today about just that.  Anabele is a first generation Portuguese immigrant to America. She has a very hard time understanding how Americans, immigrants all, can refuse to let any others who want to be here stay, especially children.

And the history of slavery in America just makes her mad. Even though she knows well the history of the Portuguese in the slave trade. In fact, she said that when she watched the movie AMISTAD, about the capture of an illegal slave ship in new England before the Civil War she could not help crying several times in the theater.

By 1735 the Spanish had permanently settled their boundary issues with the English and Fort George was abandoned.  But within a year the Colony of Georgia was established and the Governor General, James Oglethorpe came south from the site of his newest town on the coast, Savannah, to establish New Inverness, or Darien, as it soon came to be called.

Why these Scottish names?  Because he brought with him a group of freshly arrived Highlanders from the bonny hills to settle and protect his colony’s southern flank from Spanish or Indian attack.

He also brought a new pastor to this area, one John Wesley, who preached to the Indians (who had heard a slightly different theology from the Spanish priest a couple of decades before who they beheaded, and weren’t buying Anglicanism either).

It was here that we are told John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, first prayed extemporaneously.  From such departures from the Church of England’s Book of Worship is today’s United Methodist Church made.

English Fort Darien was built by the Scots where a four lane bridge now crosses the Altamaha River. But soon enough it was an American fort, defending the town from the English in our Revolution.

Darien grew as a shipping port for indigo, made from rice,  as the island plantations burst with the fruit of their slaves work.  In fact not far south of Darien, across the Butler River is Butler Island, named for the huge rice plantation that sat on its shores.  Thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves, all owned by the richest man in Georgia, Philadelphia businessman Pierce Butler.

 

The story of those slaves and the cruel behavior they endured under the lash was told by the former wife of the owner, Fannie Kemble, who wrote of her year in this home in ‘Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation’. It was published in England  just two years into our Civil War and went some way toward convincing the English to not support the Confederacy, despite the island nations want of  the South’s cotton.

Back in Darien the decades before the Civil War were wonderful.  In addition to cotton (Indigo was now made from other sources than rice and sea island cotton  was all the rage in British mill towns) Georgia pine was desired for English and anyone’s ships and homes around the world.

Darien became one of the largest shippers of wood planking in the world.  But as I said earlier, then the Civil War came.  First the Union blockade, and then the Union army.  Federal soldiers stationed on St. Simon’s Island advanced on Darien to cut the railroad north to Savannah and burned the entire town, churches and all. The shipping of wood came back slowly, but by 1900 the trees had been gleaned and replanting had not yet begun.

I mentioned in yesterdays post the strength of feeling for the cause etched into the Brunswick, GA, 1906 Confederate Monument. Here, the 1916 monument is so subdued it is hard to know who is being remembered, unless you know the uniform color of a confederate soldier, at least at the beginning of the war. Perhaps when you are burned out and your livelihood is taken from you the fire you had for a cause flickers and almost dies.

We ended our day here at a Laundromat, and a walk along what once had been the Darien world shipping docks.  Today some tabby ruins, an 8 boat shrimp fleet and some sailboats claim the location.

We found a fine supper of ribs at a Brunswick SONNY’s only 4 miles from home. Then we completed our Christmas shopping so we may mail it tomorrow to our daughter’s family and our son.  Where will we be this Christmas?  We haven’t a clue.

-Ken