Fort Frederica and General Oglethorpe

You are standing where a whole fortified town once stood. In seventeen thirty six, James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony, chose this bluff on the Frederica River to build a fort and a walled town he named Frederica. Its job was blunt: guard the southern edge of British Georgia against Spanish Florida.

Within a decade Frederica grew into a community of roughly one thousand people, laid out in neat lots behind its earthen walls. To defend it, Oglethorpe raised a regiment of British regulars, at its height roughly six hundred thirty soldiers, housed in a large barracks. For a few years this was one of the most heavily fortified places in North America.

Then peace undid it. After Spain's defeat, the frontier threat faded, the regiment was disbanded in seventeen forty nine, and many townspeople drifted away. A great fire in seventeen fifty eight burned much of what remained.

Today Fort Frederica is a national monument, and what survives is quiet ruin: a piece of the powder magazine, the tabby foundations of houses, and the outline of streets in the grass. It is one of the most complete pictures we have of a vanished colonial town.