Historic Sites in Mcintosh County

The history of Mcintosh County

McIntosh County was carved from Liberty County in 1793 and named for the McIntosh family, Scottish Highlanders who were among the first colonists in the area. The Guale people lived along this coast long before Europeans arrived, and Spanish missionaries worked among them from about 1595 to 1686. In 1721 South Carolina troops built Fort King George, and in January 1736 Highland Scots from Inverness, recruited under James Oglethorpe's sponsorship, founded Darien, which became the county seat in 1816. Lachlan McIntosh, a member of the founding family, commanded Georgia forces in the Revolutionary War. Before the Civil War, enslaved people cultivated rice and Sea Island cotton on plantations across the Altamaha delta, which exported more than 6 million pounds of rice in 1859; planters included Pierce Butler, and Thomas Spalding developed a leading plantation on Sapelo Island. In June 1863 Union troops, among them Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's 54th Massachusetts regiment, sacked and burned Darien. During Reconstruction, Tunis G. Campbell rose to prominence as an African American elected official. Timber dominated the economy for decades after the war, peaking at more than 112 million board feet in 1900, and by 1960 the county had one of the largest shrimp-boat fleets on the south Atlantic coast. In 1953 the University of Georgia established its Marine Institute on Sapelo Island.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.org