Historic Sites in Liberty County

The history of Liberty County

Liberty County was formed on February 5, 1777, under Georgia's first state constitution, when the colonial parishes of St. John, St. Andrew, and St. James were combined into one county. The name honored St. John's Parish, whose residents had been among Georgia's earliest champions of independence. The Guale people inhabited this coast long before Europeans arrived, and in the late sixteenth century Spanish missionaries established Mission Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherines Island. In 1752 Congregationalists from Dorchester, South Carolina, settled the Midway district, where they grew rice and indigo; their Midway meetinghouse, completed in 1792, still stands. The port of Sunbury, founded in 1758, served as county seat until 1798, followed by Riceboro and then, from 1836, Hinesville. St. John's Parish sent Lyman Hall to the Continental Congress in 1775, and Hall and Button Gwinnett, both associated with the parish, signed the Declaration of Independence. Rice and cotton plantations worked by enslaved people shaped the antebellum economy until Sherman's campaign reached the county in December 1864; timber and turpentine followed. In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders met at Dorchester Academy, a school founded for Black students, to plan the Birmingham campaign. In 1940 the federal government bought a large part of northern Liberty County for what became Fort Stewart.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiaencyclopedia.orgen.wikipedia.org