BY
CHARLES C. JONES, Jr.
FOR HERE HAVE WE NO CONTINUING CITY.
Heb: xiii. 14
SAVANNAH:
MORNING NEWS STEAM PRINTING HOUSE.
1878.
TO
GEORGE WYMBERLEY-JONES DeRENNE, esq.,
OF SAVANNAH,
WHOSE INTELLIGENT RESEARCH, CULTIVATED TASTE, AND AMPLE FORTUNE HAVE BEEN
SO GENEROUSLY ENLISTED IN RESCUING FROM OBLIVION
THE EARLY MEMORIES OF GEORGIA,
THESE SKETCHES ARE RESPECTFULLY AND CORDIALLY INSCRIBED.
If it be praiseworthy in their descendants to erect monuments inhonor of the illustrious dead, and to perpetuate in history the lives andacts of those who gave shape to the past and encouragement to thefuture, surely it will not be deemed inappropriate to gather up thefragmentary memories of towns once vital and influential within ourborders, but now covered with the mantle of decay, without succession,and wholly silent amid the voices of the present.
Against the miasmatic influences of the swamps, Spanish perils, thehostility of the Aborigines, and the poverty and sometimes narrowmindedness of the Trust, did the Colonists grievously struggle in assertingtheir dominion over the untamed lands from the Savannah tothe Alatamaha. Nothing indicates so surely the vicissitudes and themistakes encountered during that primal period of development, as theDead Towns of Georgia. From each comes in turn the whisperof hope, the sound of the battle with nature for life and comfort, thesad strain of disappointment, and then the silence of nothingness.
Of the chosen seats and characteristics of the primitive peoples whoinhabited this territory prior to the advent of the European we haveelsewhere spoken.[1]
Of the indications of a foreign occupancy antedating the colonizationunder Oglethorpe, such, for example, as those observed by DeBrahm[2]on Demetrius’ island, and a few others which might be mentioned,—werefrain from writing, because the theories explanatory of their origin,possession, and abandonment, are so nebulous as to seem incapable ofsatisfactory solution.
In narrating the traditions and grouping the almost obsolete memoriesof these deserted villages we have endeavored to revive them, asfar as practicable, in the language of those to whom we are indebtedfor their transmission.
Charles C. Jones, Jr.
Augusta, Georgia, February 1st, 1878.