Historic Sites in Bryan County

The history of Bryan County

Bryan County was created by an act of the legislature on December 19, 1793, mainly from Chatham County, with Effingham County contributing land the following year. It is named for Jonathan Bryan, a colonial planter and Revolutionary patriot who sat on Georgia's Executive Council in 1777. Its first temporary county seat was the colonial town of Hardwick on the Ogeechee River, founded in 1755 and once proposed by royal governors as Georgia's capital but now a lost town. The seat later moved several times before settling at Pembroke in 1937. In the antebellum era, enslaved people cultivated the rice plantations along the Ogeechee, and by 1855 the county shipped millions of pounds of rice a year, aided by the Savannah and Ogeechee Canal and a railroad completed in 1856. During the Civil War, Confederates built Fort McAllister, an earthwork at Genesis Point on the Ogeechee, which withstood repeated attacks by Union ironclads in 1862 and 1863 before falling to General William T. Sherman's troops in December 1864, opening the way to Savannah. The fort is now preserved as a state park. Beginning in 1925 automaker Henry Ford bought about 85,000 acres around the railroad community of Ways Station, building schools, industries and medical facilities; in 1941 the town was renamed Richmond Hill after his winter estate.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com