Hawkins-Davison Houses, Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia

by Margaret Davis Cate; Charles H. Fairbanks

HAWKINS-DAVISON HOUSES
FREDERICA
St. Simons Island, Georgia

Reprinted from
THE GEORGIA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Vol. XL No. 3 Sept. 1956

Publication No. 2
FORT FREDERICA ASSOCIATION

The Original Houses of Frederica, Georgia:
The Hawkins-Davison Houses

By Margaret Davis Cate[1]

The recent excavation of the building sites in the old Town of Frederica has stirred interest in this now “Dead Town” and in the fortification, Fort Frederica.

Fort Frederica, located at a bluff on the western shore of St. Simons Island, Georgia, and on the Inland Waterway, was founded in 1736 by the British under the leadership of James Edward Oglethorpe, as an outpost to protect the colony of Georgia and the other British possessions to the north against the Spaniards in Florida. It became one of the most expensive fortifications built by the British in America and the military headquarters for a string of fortifications erected along this southern frontier of Britain’s provinces in North America.

The Town of Frederica, adjacent to the fort, was settled by forty families brought here at that time. These settlers built Fort Frederica and manned the fortifications until the coming of the regiment of British soldiers two years later.

Occupying about thirty-five acres of land, the town was half a hexagon in shape, divided by Talbott Street, generally called Broad Street, into two wards—North Ward and South Ward—and was laid out into eighty-four lots, which were granted to the settlers and on which they built their homes. About half a mile from Frederica, and surrounding the town on three sides, were the garden lots while the fifty-acre tracts granted the settlers were located in various parts of St. Simons Island.

Later, a larger area of safety being necessary, the entire town was fortified and surrounded by a moat, the banks of which formed the ramparts of the town. A wall of posts ten feet high, forming the stockade and palisade, flanked both sides of the moat, with five-sided towers on the corner bastions. Entrance into the town was through the Town Gate.