The Stamp Act was supposed to raise money to pay off the country’s enormous debt following eight years of war, but instead it started a revolution. The French and Indian War, fought on the North American frontier, cost Britain a king’s ransom, and Parliament thought the American colonists should help pay for it. The Stamp […]
After years of planning and two months crossing the Atlantic, James Oglethorpe and 114 colonists climbed 40 feet up the bluff from the Savannah River on this day in 1733 and founded the colony of Georgia. George II granted the Georgia trustees a charter for the colony a year earlier. The trustees’ motto was Non […]
Our state still bears his name, but King George II never set foot here. He was born in Germany and when he succeeded his father, George I, in 1727, he became the second of Britain’s Hanoverian German kings. George II signed the charter creating the colony of Georgia in 1732. James Oglethorpe persuaded the king […]
On this day in 1735, a group of Scottish Highlanders sailed from Inverness, Scotland aboard the Prince of Wales, bound for Georgia. They disembarked on the northern bank of the Altamaha River, where they founded New Inverness—later named Darien—60 miles south of Savannah. The Scots were among the finest soldiers in the world and had […]
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 […]
Long before Plymouth, or Jamestown or even St. Augustine, there was another settlement in North American: the very first European attempt to establish a permanent colony on the mainland since the Vikings 500 years earlier. Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon and 600 Spanish colonists landed on Georgia's coast on this day in 1526, over 200 years […]