Secrets of the Upper Ogeechee-Part II
(This article is scheduled to appear in the Spring 2009 issue of Splash magazine
and is presented here as an advance copy with permission of the publisher.)
Since my childhood, the Ogeechee River and the lands that border it have been a part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of nights spent camping on its banks, and of Thanksgiving dinners celebrated over campfires on bluffs overlooking the stream below. A photograph from the Georgia Archives collection dated April 22, 1956, shows my relatives around a campfire near Fenn’s Bridge in Washington County. I would have been seven years old at the time. I don’t think I was there at that particular moment, but I could have been. Avid birdwatchers all, they were probably enjoying the annual spring migration up this remote natural waterway.
In the middle to late eighteenth century, the spot where they sat would have been Indian territory, the far side of the border beyond what in those days passed for “civilization.” The main routes of commerce and the demarcation lines between known and unexplored lands were the rivers. Today, the countryside here is covered with pine forests and abandoned farmsteads interspersed between shady streets of sleepy little towns. But before and during the American Revolution, and for decades thereafter, this part of the state was the center of growth and westward expansion, the seat of government, and a major hub of commerce.
In my library at home there hangs an 1806 map of Georgia. By that time the coastal areas were heavily settled, as were the lands around the Savannah River. The Ogeechee was the frontier, with the State’s new capital at Louisville, and the village of Georgetown up the river on the old Indian trail leading to the west. As early as the 1750s, a few intrepid settlers staked claims along the river, often struggling to survive in the wilderness among sometimes hostile Indians.
By 1763, the Governor of the then-colony of Georgia had negotiated an agreement with the Creeks that officially opened the land between the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers to settlement. Shortly thereafter, a Scotch-Irish immigrant named George Galphin and two other men petitioned the state to grant 50,000 acres near present-day Louisville for the settlement of Protestant Irish families. Galphin was a successful Indian trader, and later played a major role in negotiations with the various tribes during the Revolution. Although the group had some success in attracting settlers to the new town of Queensborough, frequent Indian raids made life dangerous. The violence and destruction that accompanied the Revolution led to the final decline and disappearance of this early colonial town.
During this time, small settlements had begun to appear up and down the river. Just below the Fall Line, the uppermost site where poleboat travel was possible, the village of Georgetown was established. By the 1780s, it boasted an official state tobacco inspector and at least one warehouse to store goods for transport downriver.
Savannah had been the Colony of Georgia’s capital until the Revolutionary War when British occupation forced the rebel legislature to meet in Augusta. As the center of the new state’s population shifted inland and westward, lawmakers recognized the need for a new seat of Government. In 1786 they voted to establish a new city on the Ogeechee. It was to be Georgia’s first permanent capital, named Louisville in honor of King Louis XVI of France for his aid to the colonies during their struggle for independence. The town was laid out in formal fashion near the older settlement of Queensborough, and construction begun on a new State House. Here, many of the early important laws of the state were enacted. The Great Seal was approved, the governing body of the University of Georgia established, and the Rescinding Act that undid the Great Yazoo Fraud was passed.
But times changed. Settlement moved westward, and with it the center of government. In 1807, the legislature began meeting in Milledgeville on the Oconee River. In 1808, the General Assembly decreed that landowners no longer had to keep the Ogeechee River open to unimpeded navigation above Fenn’s Bridge, about halfway between Louisville and Georgetown. Over the following decades the once vibrant frontier towns faded into obscurity. Georgetown probably ceased to exist sometime in the 1820s. Louisville, now a quiet county seat, retains much of its former elegance in its tree-lined streets laid out more than two centuries ago.
Today a visitor to the upper Ogeechee finds fascinating hints of the area’s historic past. Queensborough with its Irish immigrants no longer exists, but the name lives on in the Queensborough Bank and its branches in east and south Georgia. Oak trees on Louisville’s Main Street shade the old market house that dates from the early 1800s. The market shelters a bronze bell, cast in France in 1772. It is said that the bell was originally destined for a convent in New Orleans. The boat on which it was being shipped was captured by pirates, and the bell somehow ended up in Savannah before being sent to the new state capital some years later. 
Further up the river to the northeast lies Fenn’s Bridge at the site where the Fall Line Freeway crosses the river between Macon and Augusta. The name is pronounced “Fann,” reflecting its pre-16th century Middle English origins. Here empty forest grows where a thriving settlement once stood. The remains of the old pilings that supported the bridge that Sherman’s men crossed on their March to the Sea in 1864 are visible during dry times when the water is low. As to Georgetown further inland, only the most determined explorer can find the few moss-covered bricks beside the river that mark its former location amid thousands of acres of sparsely populated timberland.
In some sense, over the past two centuries this part of the Ogeechee and the lands that surround it have come full circle. What was once wilderness has, after a brief but intense flame in the fire of history, returned for the most part to its wild state. Fertile lowland, once plowed by mules and oxen, now grows trees as it did before the arrival of European settlers. The stillness of the forest is broken only the cry of the hawk, the cooing of the dove and the haunting voice of the owl.
I spend many afternoons at the river watching wood ducks return at sunset from a day of foraging while I unwind from the stresses of another day at the office. Every now and then I’ll kick up an arrowhead or bit of Indian pottery, and occasionally I’ll find an old coin among the hand-made bricks of houses that fell down more than a century ago. The Ogeechee is my secret place, but it’s something that I’m willing to share.