Lowcountry

Georgia and its cotton industry may well have gone off the tracks if it hadn’t been for William Washington Gordon. In 1835, Gordon was instrumental in raising money for the railroad that became the Central of Georgia. South Carolina had already built a railroad line from Charleston to the interior. It threatened to send Georgia’s […]

Lyman Hall was an ordained minister, a doctor and one of three Georgians to sign the Declaration of Independence, quite a resume for a man born in Connecticut in 1747. Hall was from old New England stock and graduated from Yale. He abandoned the congregational ministry for medicine and moved South, eventually settling in Georgia […]

On September 16, 1779, the Siege of Savannah began during the American Revolution. Captured in December 1778, Georgia was the only colony the British re-conquered. The following September, America's new French allies anchored a fleet of 47 ships offshore carrying 5,000 soldiers, including 500 Haitians.  Their commander, Admiral Charles–Hector d'Estaing, linked up with American General […]

Casimir Pulaski came from Poland to fight in the American Revolution and is one of only seven people to be granted honorary U.S. citizenship. Pulaski was born an aristocrat in Warsaw in 1745. He first led men in battle as a freedom fighter in Poland. After meeting Ben Franklin in France, he came to America […]

His John Hancock is rarer than John Hancock’s. Born in England in 1735, Button Gwinnett came to Savannah 30 years later. He bought St. Catherine’s Island and became a planter. In 1776 he was elected commander of Georgia’s Continental Army Battalion during the American Revolution. When political opponents- including Lachlan McIntosh- challenged his election, he […]

Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandfather was Georgia’s first chief executive. Archibald Bulloch was born in Charleston in 1730 and moved to Georgia in 1758. When the revolutionary crisis began, Bulloch became an outspoken leader of the Liberty Party that championed American rights. He served as president of Georgia’s Provincial Congress that met in 1775 to address the […]

King Cotton wound up owing Eli Whitney a lot. Born in 1765 in Massachusetts, the unemployed Yale graduate came South for a teaching job. When that didn’t pan out, he came to Georgia in 1792. His friend Catharine Greene, General Nathanael Greene’s widow, invited him to her plantation outside Savannah. English Mills had created a […]

A Revolutionary War hero, born on this day, played a critical role in helping Georgia defeat the British. Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s top lieutenant, was an unlikely warrior. Born in Rhode Island, he was raised a pacifist Quaker. But when the war began, he helped form a militia unit. Greene fought in many of the […]

Georgia might have become a Spanish colony had it not been for the Battle of Bloody Marsh, fought on this day in 1742. The battle on St. Simon’s Island was part of a global clash of arms between two empires: England and Spain. The two nations were at odds over pirateering on the high seas […]

When James Oglethorpe and the English colonists arrived in Georgia in 1733, Tomochichi was here to greet them.  It was his artful diplomacy between the English settlers and the native population that ensured Georgia's peaceful beginnings.  Tomochichi was chief of the Yamacraw tribe, which he created from a group of Creek and Yamasee natives. They […]