James Jackson was a pugnacious politician with a fiery temper. Born in England in 1756, he came to Savannah as a teen and fought in the American Revolution. Jackson served in the first Congress under the new U.S. Constitution, and supported Thomas Jefferson’s fledgling Democratic-Republicans against Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. Jackson was in the U.S. Senate […]
Fort Pulaski was built by the U.S. Army to protect Savannah from attack, but no one ever dreamed that it would be attacked by the U.S. Army. The fort was built at the mouth of the Savannah River on Cockspur Island. Much of the early work was done by young Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, recently […]
It cost three men their lives and provided the legal basis for the Trail of Tears, the forcible removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia. The Treaty of New Echota was signed on this day in 1835, ceding Cherokee land to the U.S. in exchange for compensation. The treaty had been negotiated by a Cherokee […]
What better gift than freedom? That’s what William and Ellen Craft gave each other, and celebrated this day in 1848. Their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, was exactly what they did. The Crafts were slaves in Macon who devised a daring and dangerous plan of escape. Ellen was the daughter of her white […]
King Cotton wound up owing Eli Whitney a lot. Born in 1765 in Massachusetts, the unemployed Yale graduate came South for a teaching job. When that didn’t pan out, he came to Georgia in 1792. His friend Catharine Greene, General Nathanael Greene’s widow, invited him to her plantation outside Savannah. English Mills had created a […]
It was a whale of a deal for Georgia. It holds 10 million gallons of water and is the largest one of its kind in the world, and it was a gift to the people of Georgia. The Georgia Aquarium opened in 2005, thanks to a $250 million gift from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. […]
He is the only person in the United States ever to be executed for war crimes. Hartmann Heinrich Wirz –“Henry”—was born in Switzerland in 1823. He was practicing medicine in Louisiana when the Civil War began. Wirz was eventually assigned to the staff of General John Winder, who was in charge of Confederate prisoner of […]
Its unmatched beauty has been around for millennia, but the largest of Georgia’s Barrier Islands only became a national seashore on this day in 1972. Cumberland Island is the southernmost of Georgia’s Sea Islands. This magical place is noted for having several unique ecological systems: beaches and dunes, inland maritime forests, and saltwater marshes. The […]
It was October and the trees were golden…and not just the trees. Benjamin Parks was walking through the woods of north Georgia when he kicked a stone. There were lots of stones in the woods, but the color of this one caught Parks’ eye. It turned out to be gold. Five other people claimed to […]
On this day in 1735, a group of Scottish Highlanders sailed from Inverness, Scotland aboard the Prince of Wales, bound for Georgia. They disembarked on the northern bank of the Altamaha River, where they founded New Inverness—later named Darien—60 miles south of Savannah. The Scots were among the finest soldiers in the world and had […]
