Darien, Georgia: Scottish Highlanders and the Town That Burned

In January of seventeen thirty-six, a company of one hundred seventy-seven Highland Scots from Inverness arrived at the mouth of the Altamaha River, recruited by James Oglethorpe to serve as soldier-settlers on the southernmost edge of the British American colonies. Led by John McIntosh Mohr and Hugh Mackay, they built a fortified town they first called New Inverness. It was later renamed Darien, in bittersweet honor of a disastrous Scottish colonial attempt at the Isthmus of Panama a generation earlier.

These Highland Scots were placed here deliberately, as a human buffer between the British settlements to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. They were veterans, trained fighters, and they were expected to hold the line. Their descendants, the McIntosh family, became some of the most prominent figures in colonial and revolutionary Georgia. General Lachlan McIntosh commanded Georgia's forces during the Revolutionary War.

Darien grew into a prosperous timber and rice port, one of the wealthiest towns on the Georgia coast. Then came June eleventh, eighteen sixty-three.

Union Colonel James Montgomery, commanding the Second South Carolina United States Colored Troops, ordered his men to burn Darien to the ground. The town was virtually undefended; most residents had already fled inland. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commanding the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, protested directly to his superiors, calling the burning a barbarous sort of warfare. His objections were overruled. By nightfall, Darien's churches, businesses, public buildings, and most private homes were ash.

Shaw was killed six weeks later at Fort Wagner. Darien eventually rebuilt, though it never fully recovered its antebellum prosperity. The burning remains one of the more contested acts of the Civil War in Georgia.