In 1736, James Oglethorpe, founder of the British colony of Georgia, sailed to St. Simons Island off the Georgia coast with a body of soldiers, tradesmen and women, farmers and indentured servants. They established the settlement of Frederica on the north central part of the island. From that base Oglethorpe and his company withstood challenges from the Spanish at St. Augustine to assert Britain's claim to the territory north of Florida. Frederica was later abandoned, and only two partial structures remain: a part of the fort structure and a part of the soldiers' barracks. Starting in the 1950s, archeological activities assisted by maps of the townsite have unearthed several building foundations and numerous pieces of artifacts that had belonged to these settlers. The result is the Fort Frederica National Monument.
Frederica can be viewed as Oglethorpe's first effort at town designing and building. It is a very simple grid without any of the squares he incorported into his design of Savannah. The primitive nature of the effort carries over to the use of material for building. Walls were made of something called tabby, which consisted of a mixture of sand, lime, water and oyster shells to make a crude kind of concrete. The walls were six to eight inches thick. To give their houses an English style, the tabby walls were covered with clapboard siding.
Oglethorpe was accompanied in 1736 to St. Simons Island by John and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist chuch. An interesting story is that the wife of Dr. Hawkins, the town physician and magistrate, tried to kill John Wesley with a knife. He got away, but only after Mrs. Hawkins had ripped off a piece of his shirt with her teeth. Funny I don't remember hearing that Wesley story in Sunday School. Lucky for the church they didn't have Twitter then, or maybe no Methodism.
Mileage: 152. Cumulative mileage: 607. Today's earworm: "(That's Why) The Lady Is a Tramp."
