Historic Sites in Camden County

The history of Camden County

Camden County, the southernmost county on Georgia's coast, is one of the eight original counties created by the state constitution of 1777. It combined the colonial parishes of St. Mary and St. Thomas with lands ceded by the Muscogee (Creek) people, and it was named for Charles Pratt, Earl of Camden, the English chief justice and lord chancellor who sympathized with the American colonies. The county seat moved repeatedly. Court was held at St. Patrick beginning in 1787, then at St. Marys from 1792, at Jefferson (Jeffersonton) from 1800, back at St. Marys from 1872, and finally at Woodbine, the county seat since 1923. Before the Civil War, plantations worked by enslaved people produced rice, cotton and corn. Charles Rinaldo Floyd, who commanded troops in the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, and Confederate general William J. Hardee both had Camden County roots. On Cumberland Island, steel magnate Thomas Carnegie began buying land in 1881, and his family eventually held most of the island; the ruins of their Dungeness mansion, which burned in 1959, now stand within Cumberland Island National Seashore, established in 1972. Timber, turpentine and pulp and paper later drove the mainland economy, and the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, built in the late 1970s, transformed the county.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.com