Purrysburg: A Swiss Colony That Vanished

In seventeen thirty-two and seventeen thirty-three, a Swiss entrepreneur named Jean-Pierre Purry led roughly two hundred sixty French-speaking and German-speaking Swiss colonists to the South Carolina lowcountry, settling on the Savannah River in what is now Jasper County. The colony, called Purrysburg, had been promised a large tract of land by the colonial government. Purry had spent years lobbying the British Crown for the grant, convinced that this latitude was ideally suited for wine and silk production.

The colony struggled from the start. The terrain was swampy, the climate brutal, and the linguistic divide between French- and German-speakers created internal friction. Many settlers drifted away to Charleston, Savannah, and the Georgia interior. Purry himself died in seventeen thirty-six. By the end of the eighteenth century, the township had essentially dissolved. Today a small stone cross marks the Purrysburg Cemetery, all that physically remains of one of colonial America's more ambitious experiments in planned settlement.