Attachment-N_Reference_Part_1_of_3.pdf

Fort Frederica in 1742

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Frederica Today Illustra t Ion nps/ l . Kenneth t ownsend

Touring the Park

Oglethorpe’s Town

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Spur Battery

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South Storehouse

North Storehouse

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Cross street

F R E D E R I C A R I V E R

Hawkins- Davison Houses

Calwell House

Barracks

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Bastion

Earthen Walls

Town Gate Moat

Now lost to time and the wan der ing river, Frederica barely re sembles the mili-tary town that once flou -ished here. From 1736 to 1749 the fort and its regi-mental garrison were the hub of British military oper-ations on Georgia’s frontier.

This conjectural illustra tion shows Frederica in the piv-otal year 1742 when Ogle-thorpe’s troops defeated Spanish troops at Bloody Marsh. Like Savannah, Fred-erica was a planned town, built by the “worthy poor” who Oglethorpe and fellow trustees trans planted here.

It was a thoroughly English town of spacious streets and substantial houses in the Georgian style. An admiring traveler de scribed the scene for London Mag-azine in 1745: “Some hous-es are built entirely of brick, some of brick and wood, some few of tabby work;

but most of the meaner sort of wood only.”

Of all his settlements in Georgia, Oglethorpe liked this one best. He enjoyed the town’s military air and was proud of his troops, who “made as fine an a -pearance upon the parade as any Regiment in the King’s serv ice.”

His own home, a cottage amid a grove of live oaks with a garden and orchard nearby, seemed to a visitor like “a neat country village where the consequences of all the various industries of an European farm may be seen.”

A good way to see Fred erica is to stroll through the town site with this guide in hand.

Sites are marked on the map at left.

A military road connect-ed Frederica with Fort St.

Simons, six miles away on the south end of the is-land. More like a path cut through a forest than a road, it crossed marshy ground on a causeway.

British troops marched down this path to battle in vading Spanish troops in 1742.

The town gate con-trolled land access to Frederica. Soldiers rou-tinely stood guard here.

Outside the gate, towns-people traded with local Creek and Yuchi Indians.

Broad Street divided the town into north and south wards. The first settlers planted orange trees along this street, thinking that in time they would have “a very pretty effect on the view, and render . . . the town pleasingly shady.”

The three-story Calwell house was the best dwelling in town. John Calwell made candles and soap here and his wife kept a shop.

Two prominent families occupied the Hawkins- Davison houses. Thomas Hawkins, surgeon and

On St. Simons Island 12 miles from Brunswick, Ga., the park can be reached via U.S. 17 and the FJ Torras (Bruns-wick-St. Simons) Cause-way. Hours: 8:30 am to 5 pm. No camping facili-ties.

Bloody Marsh Battle Site is a detached park unit six miles south of Fred-erica. Near by are the re-mains of Fort St. Simons, constructed on the is-land’s south end, and the old military road that connected the fort with Fred erica. Gully Hole Creek, scene of an earlier skirmish, lies half a mile east of the visitor center.

Illustra t Ion nps/ ro B wood

The site is marked by a state historic plaque.

Help Protect Frederica Fort Frederica is an archeolo gical site and the remains here are fragile. Please do not walk on or disturb any surviving foundations, brick or tabby.

Notify a park ranger if you see exposed arti-facts so the ranger can collect and document them to help complete the picture of life here in colonial times.

Federal law prohibits digging or using metal detectors within the park.

apothecary, built the west half; Samuel Davi-son, tavernkeep and town constable, built the east half. They ran their businesses here.

A tabby fort guarded the twisting water ap proach to the town. The fort was square with bastions on each corner and separat-ed from the town by a palisade and moat. Inside were a magazine for guns and ammunition, officers’ quarters, stor -houses, and a forge. A spur battery, lost long ago to the river, mount-ed six or seven cannon.

The barracks housed most of the several hun-dred soldiers garrisoned at Frederica. Other sol-diers lived nearby in pal-metto-thatched huts.

The northeast bastion is a remnant of works that Og le thorpe built in 1739 when an invasion threatened. He fortified the town with an earth-en rampart, a moat six to eight feet deep, and a cedar palisade 10 feet high.

The burying ground, of which little is known, lay just east of town.

For a Safe Visit

• Lightning storms are dangerous. Seek shelter in the visitor center or in your car but not under trees. • Watch your step near the riverbank; the water is swift and deep.

• Don’t climb on the fort or cannon. • Parents should keep a careful watch on small children.

Related Sites Visit other nearby parks to learn more about col-onial Georgia. Fort King George State Historic Site in Darien recon structs the first British outpost in Georgia. It protected the Al tama ha River and in-ner passage from French and Spanish attack from 1721 to 1736. Wormsloe State Historic Site on the Isle of Hope near Savan-nah preserves ruins of a plantation built 1739–45.

Here stood the fortified home of Noble Jones, one of Georgia’s first se -tlers. At Fort Morris State Historic Site, south of Savan nah, are remains of a once-prosperous port city and an earthen work captured by the British in the Revolutionary War.

Several National Park Service sites in Flor i da fi -ure in Frederica’s story.

Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, in Jack-son ville, preserves areas relating to the British oc-cupation of Florida from 1763 to 1784. Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Ma-tanzas na tional monu-ments in St. Augustine re-mind us that Spain also claimed the land on which Frederica stood and was willing to fight for it

More Information Fort Frederica National Monument 6515 Frederica Road St. Simons Island, GA 31522-9727 912-638-3639 www.nps.gov/fofr

Fort Frederica National Monument is one of over 390 parks in the Na tional Park System. To learn more about national parks and National Park Service programs in America’s communities, visit www.nps.gov.

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Attachment N, Reference October 2022ctob

Fort Frederica National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Fort Frederica National Monument Georgia

Defending Utopia

War and Decline

The Battle of Bloody Marsh

James Edward Oglethorpe

A Military Town on the Colonial Georgia Frontier

The fi rst settlers at Frederica lived for several months in crude palmetto huts.

Oglethorpe got along well with the local Yuchi, Yamacraw, and Creek Indians, whose trade was important to the fi rst settlers.

In campaigns against Spain, the Indians fought alongside the British. A German set-tler from Salzburg sketched this Indian couple in 1736.

The ruins of old Frederica recall the struggle for empire in the Southeast in the 1700s. Ancient ri-vals Spain and Great Britain, the main contend-ers, both claimed the land between St. Augustine and Charleston. But Spain was a waning power in this part of North America while Great Britain was building a vast empire from Maine to Caroli-

na. As a southern frontier buffer, Britain planted the Georgia colony—the last of the original 13 and the fi rst since Quakers founded Pennsylva-nia half a century earlier—in the territory below Carolina.

The colony sprang as much from a spirit of be-nevolence as from the realities of imperial poli-tics. Like the Quaker venture, Georgia was an ex-periment in idealism. In the 1720s England felt a wave of sentiment to remedy the plight of thou-sands of poor people drifting without jobs or languishing in debtors’ jail. To salvage these “worthy poor,” prominent English citizens— among them James Oglethorpe, a soldier and politician concerned with the welfare of both the poor and the empire—petitioned the Crown for a land grant south of the Savannah River.

The government welcomed the enterprise as a way to hold the Spanish in check and relieve social distress at home.

In 1732 King George II granted to a board of trustees all the land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers and west from their headwaters to the Pacifi c—a tract larger than Britain. British of all classes rallied to the idea of a new Utopia in the American wilderness. Money poured in, public and private, and the fi rst shipload of 114 people set sail led by Oglethorpe. Reaching Georgia in January 1733, they traveled up the Savannah River 18 miles to their new home.

Spurred by Oglethorpe’s energy—he was every-where “building the Town, Keeping peace, lay-ing out land, Supplying the Stores with provi-sion, encouraging the faint hearted &c”—an orderly town, Savannah, rose on the bluffs.

Settlement was one of Oglethorpe’s purposes;

another was defense against the Spanish. In 1734 he sailed down the coast to fi nd strategic points to fortify. He found one on a sea island just below the mouth of the Altamaha. This was St. Simons, an island thick with live oaks draped in moss, with good water and a fertile upland.

Two years later he returned with the fi rst set-tlers, 44 men (mostly skilled workers) and 72 women and children, and laid out a military town on a bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the inland passage up the coast. He named the town for Frederick, the king’s only son. It came to be Oglethorpe’s favorite town in Georgia.

The settlers’ fi rst task was to build a fort. Under Oglethorpe’s direction they raised an earthen work that refl ected classical ideas of the 1600s French military engineer Vauban. Over the years Oglethorpe remade this work and the town into a formidable position. Frederica is defended, wrote a visitor in 1745, “by a pretty strong Fort of Tappy, which has several 18 Pounders mount-ed on a Ravelin in its Front, and commands the River both upwards and downwards; and is sur-rounded by a quadrangular Rampart, with 4 bastions, of Earth well stockaded and turfed, and a palisadoed Ditch.”

Behind the fort, on a fi eld planted in corn by the Indians, Oglethorpe laid out 84 lots, most 60 by 90 feet. Each family received a lot for building and 50 country acres for crops. The fi rst dwell-ings, palmetto huts, were eventually replaced by houses built of wood, tabby (a crude concrete made of burnt oyster shells), and brick in the Georgian style. Orange trees shaded the main road, 75-foot-wide Broad Street, which ran from the fort to the town gates. Frederica’s artisans included a blacksmith—his shop was in the fort’s northeast bastion—wheelwright, and public baker Oglethorpe brought over as an inden-tured servant.

Aside from lacking a church spire, 1740s Frederi-ca might have passed for an English midlands vil-lage. The population reached about 500, and the town took on an air of permanency. Tradespeo-ple and skilled workers prospered. Farmers culti-vated crops with their own hands in the nearby fi elds—slavery was banned in the colony. Most families supplemented their diet with the re-gion’s abundant wildlife, shooting almost any-thing that moved.

A man of vision, compas-sion, and vast energy, Oglethorpe founded and led the Georgia colony for its fi rst decade. Under his guidance, the colony welcomed immigrants of diverse religious views and national origins, banned slavery and rum, and successfully resisted Spanish attack.

The families who lived in these houses were among Frederica’s fi rst settlers. Dr. Thomas Hawkins and his wife, Beatre, lived in the house on the right.

His positions as the reg-imental surgeon, town physician, and apothe-cary and as an offi cer of the court gave him a substantial income.

This tableware and wine bottle are a few of the many domestic artifacts unearthed at Frederica.

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ILLUSTRATION NPS/L. KENNETH TOWNSEND

The Hawkins-Davison Houses

Spain saw the Georgia settlements as a threat to its interests in Florida. Spoiling for a fi ght, Oglethorpe returned to England in 1737 to raise troops. In 1738 he came back at the head of a 630-man regiment of British regulars, the 42d Regiment of Foot (Oglethorpe’s); a few hundred troops from Gibraltar; and most of the privates of a standing regiment in England, the 25th Foot.

The regiment’s eight companies of infantry and one of grenadiers carried the long musket, the famous Brown Bess, and infantry swords. The elite grenade-carrying grenadiers were chosen for their size and combat skill. Oglethorpe mostly garrisoned his troops at Frederica and a new fort, Fort St. Simons, on the south end of the island.

In 1739 Britain and Spain went to war over the slave trade. Fighting ranged across the Caribbean and up the Georgia coast to Frederica. Expecting a Spanish attack, Oglethorpe enclosed the town with an earthen wall and 10-foot-wide palisaded moat fed by the river. In early 1740 the aggres-sive Oglethorpe set out to capture St. Augustine.

With 900 troops and 1,100 Indian allies, he laid siege to the Spanish town but could not breach its defenses. By mid-summer, his plans awry, a frustrated Oglethorpe was back in Frederica.

The Spanish now had the initiative. With 50 sail-ing vessels and 2,000 troops they threatened Oglethorpe’s troublesome position in early July 1742. A column of men advanced to within sight of Frederica but the British beat them back. This was the high point of the Spanish invasion. Later that day, Oglethorpe’s men ambushed another column at Bloody Marsh for a decisive victory.

Within a week the dispirited Spanish left the island, and Oglethorpe proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for this deliverance.

Born of war, Frederica expired with the coming of peace. After one more foray against Spanish Florida, Oglethorpe sailed to England for the last time in 1743. His regiment was disbanded in 1749. Absent several hundred soldiers’ money, the town and its shopkeepers and tradespeople could not prosper. A visitor in 1755 described Frederica as “houses without inhabitants, bar-racks without soldiers, guns without carriages, and streets overgrown with weeds.” The town hung on a few more years, and even survived a 1758 fi re, but it had outlived its purpose and fell into ruin.

Two units of troops defended Frederica against Spain: Ogle-thorpe’s own regiment (the 42d Regiment of Foot); and the Highland Independent Company, ILLUSTRATIONS NPS/L. KENNETH TOWNSEND stationed at a Scottish settlement, Darien, on the Alta maha River, and at Fort St. Simons. At left are a Highlander private and a grenadier sergeant of the 42d.

Having repelled Ogle-thorpe at the gates of St. Augustine, the Span-ish gathered an armada and in June 1742 sailed north to in vade the Eng-lish colonies and regain lands they con sidered theirs. Ogle thorpe faced the threat without sup-port from the Carolin-ians or London. Round -ing up Indians, militia, and Scottish Highland-ers to go with his regu-lars, the resourceful commander tirelessly prepared his defenses.

He had about 900 men but faced twice that number.

Spanish commander Manuel de Montiano, governor of Florida, sought to destroy Fred-erica and lay waste the coast as far north as Port Royal, S.C. After taking that town, he would strike at the Eng-lish plantation system by freeing slaves in the nearby countryside.

In early July his ships ran by the guns of Fort St. Simons and landed troops a few miles up the inland passage.

Outfl anked, Ogle thorpe pulled back to Frederica.

On July 7, some 200

Spaniards ad vanced up the military road that connected the forts.

Oglethorpe routed this column with a fi erce attack.

Learning of this repulse, Montiano sent several hundred men forward to cover the retreat, but his troops ran into a British ambush posted “in a Wood with a large . . .

Meadow in their Front.”

Legend has it the marsh ran red with blood as British musket fi re rout-ed this force, too. Al-though casualties were relatively light, with in the week Montiano’s army quit St. Simons and returned to Florida, end-ing the last Spanish threat to the Georgia colony.

Their neighbors were the well-liked tavern keeper, town consta-ble, and ship inspector Samuel Davison and his wife Susanna.

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Fort Frederica National Monument National Park Service

Bloody Marsh and Gully Hole Creek

In the Battle of Bloody Marsh, soldiers defended the approach to the British town of Frederica, depicted here.

Parts of the historic Military Road are still in use today, incorporated into the modern Frederica Road.

In 1742, the Military Road was a primitive supply path connecting the British forts of St. Simons and Frederica. Along this trail two intense battles were fought between British troops and Spanish soldiers eager to dominate the territory between South Carolina and Florida. Both skirmishes, the Battle of Bloody Marsh and the Battle of Gully Hole Creek, ended in victory for the British and established their ownership of the region.

Follow in the footsteps of the soldiers as you travel the seven miles between the two forts and visit the remains of the town of Frederica, north of Bloody Marsh.

Hut Sweet Hut

The first soldiers arrived on St. Simon’s Island in 1738.

They served as a “thin red line,” protecting the British colonies to the north from the Spanish to the south, but much more time was spent in toil than in battle.

Frederica’s huts were captured in journal drawings made by Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, a 25-year old German who visited the settlement in 1736.

Most of the soldiers garrisoned at Fort Frederica lived in crude huts surrounding the parade ground.

The sturdier barracks housed only a few lucky soldiers. Living in these palmetto-thatched shelters might have been passable in a mild winter, but summer brought heat, biting flies, mosquitoes, sand gnats, and snakes. In return for their willingness to lay down their lives in the wilderness, their housing was rough, their pay was meager, and they had to grow their own food.

Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library [use of graphic of soldier], The Royal Library of Denmark [images of huts]

Fort Frederica British soldier, 42nd Regiment of Foote.

The Defender

U.S. Department of the Interior

The Defender’s editorials campaigned for anti-lynching laws and integrated sports. The paper was the largest black-owned daily newspaper in the world.

In 1929, Robert Abbott placed a monument here in memory of his aunts and a father he never knew. At a time when black history was largely ignored, the monument insured that his family was not forgotten.

African American home in the rural south, about 1912.

A family newly arrived in Chicago from the south in the 1920s.

The Abbott Monument

Robert S. Abbott was a lawyer, newspaper publisher, and self-made millionaire.

Chicago Defender [for use of photos of Abbott and the Chicago Defender newspaper]; Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations [for use of photos of the family and the rural home]

Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on St. Simons Island in 1868. As the son of former slaves, the advocacy of equal rights became his life’s work. Trained as a printer and lawyer, the prejudice of the day led to failure and caused him to turn to journalism. In 1905 he founded The

Chicago Defender which would become the most influential black newspaper in the nation.

The paper denounced atrocities that affected black Americans and had to be smuggled into the South. By lauding life in the north, listing jobs, train schedules, and housing opportunities, the newspaper gave the hope and inspiration that launched the Great Migration. Eventually over 1½ million rural southern blacks would move north.

Strong Walls From Refuse The settlers on St. Simon’s Island in the 1700s used an unusual building material—oyster shells. The colonists found piles of them when they arrived here, discards from long-ago feasts of the local Guale and Mocama Indians.

These mounds of shells, or middens, formed the basic ingredient of a crude but durable concrete called tabby.

To make tabby, stacked logs and oyster shells, called ricks, were set afire and allowed to burn down to hot embers.

The shells were burnt to ash.

The wood and ash mixture formed lime. When mixed with water, sand, and more

The strong walls and foundations of many of Frederica’s buildings are built of tabby.

The settlers borrowed the recipe for tabby from the Spanish. The word might originate with the Arabic word tabbi, meaning a mixture of mortar and lime or with the Spanish word tapia which means a mud wall. It’s a very old building material dating to the 1500s.

oyster shells the lime served as a binding agent, solidifying the mixture. It was then poured into molds for foundations and walls which were stuccoed and whitewashed to protect them from water damage.

“The Gardens at Frederica are very flourishing and are great helps to the people.”

William Horton to the [Georgia] Trustees, August 26, 1738

A Woman’s Work Was Never Done

Tending a kitchen garden was one of the main tasks of the women of Frederica.

Cooking, making medicinal remedies from herbs, and preserving food occupied much of the day. Colonial women, first and foremost, were expected to be cooks. To create meals they needed fruits, vegetables, and herbs not readily available in a frontier outpost unless grown by the settlers themselves.

In addition to their toil in garden and kitchen, women worked alongside their husbands and were seamstresses, caregivers, and housekeepers. Truly, a woman’s work was never done.