Barbara Ann Stanley Overton, age 79, of Greensboro, Georgia passed away on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024, at her home with her family.
It was founded on Feb. 12, 1733, by General James Edward Oglethorpe with 114 settlers, primarily comprised of debtors, former indentured servants, and a handful of British Redcoats, in the modest colony of Savannah along the Georgia coastline.
The journey crossing the Atlantic had taken nearly two months and the colonists followed Oglethorpe, climbing a 40-foot bluff above the Savannah River to plant a flag and declare the colony’s founding.
Oglethorpe was a loyalist to the crown and the colony was named in honor of King George II, to be managed by Oglethorpe as a military governor with a board of trustees.
'The colony was given a three-pronged initial mission of economic growth, philanthropy (allowing economic opportunity for former debtors and indentured servants), and providing military protection for South Carolina to the north, founded more than three scores earlier.
Along with Georgia’s second city in Darien to the south of Savannah, the fledgling colony would succeed initially with its third mission, acting as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the English colonies to the north.
For just under 20 years, the trustees prohibited slavery (Oglethorpe was also a prominent abolitionist), as well as large landholdings. Georgians would initially work only for themselves, tending small farms. Capitalism, greed, and relocation from other colonies would bring plantations and slavery to the young colony in later decades.
The Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, under President Thomas Jefferson, would for a time give Georgia a western border that reached the Pacific Ocean. If we had been able to hang onto all that real estate, I dare say that Los Angeles, San Diego, and a good chunk of the left Coast might well be more than a bit different today.
The forced relocation of the Cherokee Nation, initiated by President Andrew Jackson, from the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in northwest Georgia between 1830 to 1850 would create the horrific Trail of Tears. It resulted in the deaths of more than 15,000 native Americans, primarily women and children forced to make the trek on foot.
The Georgia coast is also where the last slave ship in the United States made berth Nov. 10, 1858, with its by-then illegal cargo on The Wanderer at Jekyll Island.
East of Atlanta, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915 atop Stone Mountain. Decades later, the Civil Rights movement saw the birth of Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr., its best-known spiritual leader, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed on Jan. 10, 1957, at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Though Georgia was among the original seven states of the Confederacy and contributed nearly 100,000 troops to the conflict, most in service to the armies of Virginia, the Civil War would primarily be waged within 100 miles of Richmond.
It would not make its way into Georgia until Sherman’s attack and burning of Atlanta in 1864, followed by his destruction of thousands of acres of farmland and smaller towns during his months-long March to the Sea, which broke the Southern spirit and is universally considered the pivotal turning point of that war.
While Georgia has only one native-born President of the United States in Jimmy Carter (also the nation’s longest-living former president at 99 years old), President Woodrow Wilson spent his childhood and formative years in Augusta and later practiced law in Atlanta.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our longest-serving president, built his Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, almost his second home from his first visit to the hot springs in October 1924, which gave him occasional relief from the pain of crippling polio until his passing there on April 12, 1945.
As Georgia approaches 300 years old, in a nation approaching 250 (in 2026), there is much to ponder, much to regret, and much to celebrate. The Georgia of today is still in the South, but most of its residents live in metro Atlanta, a region that no longer necessarily feels “of the South.”
But Southern hospitality, unlimited iced tea, and coffee refills, and a bit more deference to civility and being good neighbors still matter here, and I would hate to live in a Georgia that ever loses that.