The dead towns of Georgia

BY CHARLES C. JONES, Jr.
FOR HERE HAVE WE NO CONTINUING CITY. Heb: xiii. 14
SAVANNAH: MORNING NEWS STEAM PRINTING HOUSE. 1878.


TO GEORGE WYMBERLEY-JONES DeRENNE, esq., OF SAVANNAH, WHOSE INTELLIGENT RESEARCH, CULTIVATED TASTE, AND AMPLE FORTUNE HAVE BEEN SO GENEROUSLY ENLISTED IN RESCUING FROM OBLIVION THE EARLY MEMORIES OF GEORGIA, THESE SKETCHES ARE RESPECTFULLY AND CORDIALLY INSCRIBED.


If it be praiseworthy in their descendants to erect monuments in honor of the illustrious dead, and to perpetuate in history the lives and acts of those who gave shape to the past and encouragement to the future, surely it will not be deemed inappropriate to gather up the fragmentary memories of towns once vital and influential within our borders, but now covered with the mantle of decay, without succession, and wholly silent amid the voices of the present.
Against the miasmatic influences of the swamps, Spanish perils, the hostility of the Aborigines, and the poverty and sometimes narrow mindedness of the Trust, did the Colonists grievously struggle in asserting their dominion over the untamed lands from the Savannah to the Alatamaha. Nothing indicates so surely the vicissitudes and the mistakes encountered during that primal period of development, as the Dead Towns of Georgia. From each comes in turn the whisper of hope, the sound of the battle with nature for life and comfort, the sad strain of disappointment, and then the silence of nothingness.
In narrating the traditions and grouping the almost obsolete memories of these deserted villages we have endeavored to revive them, as far as practicable, in the language of those to whom we are indebted for their transmission.