40 Fun Facts About Georgia Colony

Which profession was banned from Georgia Colony by the London Trustees who governed it from 1732 to 1752?

Lawyers were shut out by the Trustees, who ran Georgia from London for two decades without ever placing a governor in the colony itself.

Georgia's 1732 charter granted a strip of land between two rivers stretching west as far as which body of water?

The Pacific Ocean was the western limit on paper, written in the charter as the south seas. Georgia kept its western claims until 1802, when it ceded land that became Alabama and Mississippi.

Georgia Colony was named in honor of which British king, who granted its founding charter in 1732?

George II gave his name to the last of the Thirteen Colonies, the first new one the government had approved in more than five decades.

James Oglethorpe first pictured Georgia as a fresh start for which group crowding London's prisons in the 1720s?

Debtors inspired the plan, yet not one formerly jailed debtor was among the first colonists. The Trustees chose carpenters, tailors, bakers and farmers instead.

Which drink did Georgia's Trustees outlaw in 1735 at Oglethorpe's urging, only to make it legal again in 1742?

Rum was the target, and the Trustees even tried to stop boats carrying it along the Savannah River, over loud protests from the neighbouring colony.

Georgia was the only British colony in North America to explicitly ban which practice at the outset, until 1751?

Slavery was barred because the Trustees wanted settlers to work their own small farms. Once the ban fell, a coastal plantation economy took hold quickly.

Georgia's Trustees dreamed of exporting which fabric, and even put a mulberry leaf on their official seal?

Silk was the great hope: the seal also shows a silkworm and its cocoon, because the worms feed on mulberry leaves.

Which Yamacraw chief befriended Oglethorpe in 1733 and later sailed with him to England to meet the king?

Tomochichi died in 1739, thought to be in his late nineties, and was honoured with a British military funeral in Savannah.

Oglethorpe's 1733 town plan for Savannah arranged each neighborhood, called a ward, around which central feature?

An open public square anchored every ward, a pattern said to give Savannah more open space than any other city layout in history.

Which Polish cavalry commander was mortally wounded in the failed 1779 attack on British-held Savannah?

Casimir Pulaski was hit by grapeshot after riding ahead of his 200 horsemen to study the ground. The French and American attack failed, and the British held the city until 1782.

Britain backed Georgia partly as a military buffer to shield which older colony from the Spanish in Florida?

South Carolina, founded seventy years earlier, even sent militia to help clear the pine forest where Savannah was laid out in 1733.

Which Spanish stronghold did Oglethorpe besiege in 1740, only to fall back to Georgia when the attack failed?

St. Augustine held out against his regiment, Native allies and warships, and the failure invited a Spanish invasion of Georgia two years later.

Georgia was the only one of the Thirteen Colonies to send no delegates to which 1774 meeting in Philadelphia?

The First Continental Congress met without Georgia, where many colonists felt they needed British troops to protect the frontier.

Which Georgia signer of the Declaration of Independence died after a 1777 duel, leaving a famously rare autograph?

Button Gwinnett challenged an army rival who had publicly denounced him; both men were hit, but only his wound proved fatal. In 2012 a document he signed was valued at over $700,000.

In 1739 Oglethorpe journeyed deep inland to Coweta to renew an alliance with which powerful Native nation?

The Creek, also known as the Muscogee, agreed a treaty with him at Coweta just as Britain's war with Spain was breaking out.

Which crop became colonial Georgia's first staple in the 1750s, once the Trustees' limits on land and labor were lifted?

Rice thrived along the coast's tidal rivers, where levees and floodgates let planters flood and drain their fields with the tides.

Which Spanish conquistador marched an army across the future Georgia in 1540, nearly two centuries before Oglethorpe?

Hernando de Soto was the first European to explore Georgia's interior, and his party's records are among the best descriptions of its Native chiefdoms.

Which colony, chartered in 1681, was the last of the Thirteen Colonies founded before Georgia came along?

Pennsylvania got its charter a half-century before Georgia, which was also the only colony founded and ruled by a board of trustees.

Which Christian faith was left out when Georgia's 1732 charter promised settlers the free exercise of religion?

Catholicism was the one exception written into the charter, which used the old word papists; Spain's Catholic colony of Florida was the enemy next door.

Georgia is grouped with Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas in which region of British America?

The Southern Colonies gained their final member in Georgia, which was both the youngest and the southernmost of the thirteen.

Which trader, daughter of an English father and a Native mother, was Oglethorpe's chief interpreter from 1733 to 1743?

Mary Musgrove ran a busy deerskin trading post near the Savannah River, and her translating helped the first town get built in peace.

Which Anglican minister fled Savannah in 1737 after a failed romance and later founded the Methodist movement?

John Wesley had refused Communion to a woman he once hoped to marry, and legal action followed. While in Georgia he also published a collection of psalms and hymns.

In which 1742 battle on St. Simons Island did Oglethorpe's outnumbered troops turn back a Spanish invasion of Georgia?

Bloody Marsh was a small fight with a large result: the Spanish left St. Simons Island about a week later and never mounted another major attack on Georgia.

Oglethorpe's battles with Spanish Florida were part of which war, which Britain and Spain began fighting in 1739?

The War of Jenkins' Ear got its name after Spaniards who boarded British captain Robert Jenkins's ship in 1731 cut off his ear; he is said to have shown it to Parliament, though no record confirms it.

Which fortified town did Oglethorpe build on St. Simons Island in 1736 as the heart of Georgia's frontier defenses?

Fort Frederica honoured Frederick, Prince of Wales; the name was made feminine because a Fort Frederick already stood in the neighbouring colony.

Protestant refugees driven out by the Catholic archbishop of which city founded Ebenezer, Georgia, in 1734?

Salzburg's ruler forced twenty thousand Protestants from their homes in 1731; those who reached Georgia were settled about twenty-five miles upriver from Savannah.

Bethesda, or House of Mercy, opened near Savannah in 1740, funded by an evangelist's sermons, as which institution?

An orphanage was George Whitefield's answer to the many parentless children in 1730s Georgia, and he collected money for it while preaching across the American colonies.

The ship William and Sarah reached Savannah in July 1733 with about forty settlers of which faith, including a doctor?

Judaism took root in the colony's first summer: physician Samuel Nunez treated settlers during an epidemic, and the group founded one of America's oldest congregations.

Which trading town did Oglethorpe order laid out far up the Savannah River in 1736, naming it for the Princess of Wales?

Augusta honoured Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and it was laid out on the same forty-lot pattern used three years earlier for Savannah.

Which hardy group did Oglethorpe's agents recruit to found Darien in 1736 as a frontier guard against the Spanish?

Scottish Highlanders, 177 of them and mostly from Clan Chattan near Inverness, founded Darien and brought Presbyterian worship to Georgia.

When Georgia's Trustees surrendered their charter in 1752, a year early, the province became which type of colony?

Royal status meant a governor chosen in London, and Georgia's first, a career naval officer named John Reynolds, arrived in 1754.

Settlers who paid their own way to Trustee Georgia could bring ten of which contract workers and claim 500 acres?

Indentured servants earned their master a grant ten times the fifty-acre limit placed on settlers who came at the Trustees' expense.

In 1785 the aged Oglethorpe called in London on which American, newly arrived as the first US ambassador to Britain?

John Adams heard Georgia's founder speak of his great esteem for America, only weeks before the old general died at the age of 88.

Which group was barred from owning land in early Georgia, where each plot was expected to supply an armed defender?

Women could not own land because the Trustees assumed every plot needed a male worker who would also turn out to defend the colony.

Which nickname was given to the Savannah settlers, led by Patrick Tailfer, who attacked the Trustees' rules in print?

The Malcontents had mostly come without the Trustees' financial help, so they felt little loyalty to the founders. Tailfer wrote his attack from the safety of Charleston.

Which ship carried Oglethorpe and Georgia's first 114 colonists on the two-month voyage from Gravesend in 1732?

The Anne paused at Charleston before Oglethorpe led the settlers up to the bluff where Savannah was built.

Sir Robert Montgomery's failed 1717 scheme for a colony on the future site of Georgia went by which exotic name?

Azilia was meant to be a margravate, a fortified border province, but Montgomery never won the king's approval and interest faded after the South Sea Bubble burst.

Which Georgia governor was arrested by rebels in 1776, fled to a British warship, and returned to rule Savannah in 1779?

James Wright was the only governor to win back part of a rebel colony for the Crown, and he stayed in Savannah until the British left in 1782.

Georgia's 1732 charter set the colony between the Savannah River in the north and which river in the south?

The Altamaha marked the limit until 1763, when a proclamation by the king pushed Georgia's border down to the St. Marys River.

Which estate near Savannah, begun in the 1730s by colonist Noble Jones, is known for its long avenue of live oaks?

Wormsloe is the oldest of Georgia's tidewater estates, and Jones's fortified tabby house there doubled as a guard post with a garrison of marines.