Midway, Georgia: The Puritan Town That Shaped a Revolution

The tiny town of Midway sits in coastal Georgia with a history outsized for its size. In the seventeen fifties, Congregationalist settlers from Dorchester, South Carolina, many of them descended from Puritan New Englanders, established a community here and built what became the Midway Congregational Church. The congregation produced two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lyman Hall and Button Gwinnett, along with a remarkable number of doctors, ministers, and military officers for a settlement this remote.

The white clapboard church standing here today dates to seventeen ninety-two, built to replace the one the British burned in the Revolution. Next door, the Midway Museum, housed in an elevated tabby-style building, documents the community's extraordinary influence on early American history. Population today: a little over two thousand people.