Fort King George: Britain's First Georgia Outpost

Twelve years before Oglethorpe founded Savannah, fifteen years before the Scottish Highlanders built Darien, Britain planted its southernmost outpost in North America right here at the mouth of the Altamaha River. Fort King George was constructed in seventeen twenty-one under Colonel John Barnwell, known to history as Tuscarora Jack for his campaigns against the Tuscarora people in the Carolinas. His Majesty's Independent Company of Foot built a cypress blockhouse, barracks, and a palisaded earthwork on the riverbank and garrisoned the place with a company of about one hundred men.

The strategic logic was stark. Fort King George sat exactly halfway between Charles Town, South Carolina, to the north and Spanish-controlled Saint Augustine, Florida, to the south. It was a claim on the territory in between, a statement that Britain intended to hold this coastline against Spanish expansion from the south and French influence from the interior. The soldiers who manned it were drawn largely from a regiment of invalids, men deemed unfit for front-line service in Europe but good enough for colonial duty in a Carolina swamp.

The conditions were murderous. Disease and poor diet devastated the garrison almost immediately; the soldiers had contracted scurvy during the ocean crossing. The fort burned in seventeen twenty-six and was rebuilt the following year, but it was finally abandoned in seventeen twenty-seven when Britain concluded it was simply too expensive to maintain.

Then, years later, Oglethorpe arrived with his Scottish Highlanders and founded Darien on the same ground, giving the location a second life as a permanent settlement. Today the reconstructed blockhouse and the old British military cemetery, one of the oldest in the American Southeast, remain as a state historic site.