Darien, Georgia A History of the Town & Its Environs

This study comprising a survey of the history of Darien, the principal town and county seat of McIntosh County, Georgia, is largely extrapolated from my most recent research from 2016 to 2019 contained in a revised and expanded edition of my county history, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien is the second oldest settled municipality in Georgia with a history and culture as diverse as any in the state. Its origins lay in its founding by Highland Scots, and that Scottish legacy has transcended almost three centuries. Darien's history is unique in that it experienced a series of devastating economic downturns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet made remarkable recoveries each time to become an even more prosperous community. In addition, Darien suffered the travails of war—it was burned to the ground by federal forces in 1863, yet rebuilt and prospered economically for the next forty years as one of the leading exporters of raw timber and processed lumber in the United States, exemplifying a new industrial economy that succeeded its former antebellum agricultural economy, and reflecting the changing dynamics of a "new South" in the postbellum era. In essence, Darien was the "big little town" in its timber prosperity. The focus of this study is economic, rather than social, cultural, or political, and the preponderance of its attention is to the century and a half from 1800 to about 1960. Additionally, I have taken the liberty of incorporating within the text certain aspects of the history of other areas of McIntosh County as they affected Darien.

Buddy Sullivan is a fourth-generation coastal Georgian. He has researched and written about the history, culture and ecology of coastal Georgia for 35 years. He is the author of 22 books and monographs and is in frequent demand as a lecturer on a variety of historical topics. He is a recipient of the Governor's Medal in the Humanities from the Georgia Humanities Council in recognition of his literary and cultural contributions to the state. Sullivan's books include Georgia: A State History (2003) for the Georgia Historical Society, and two comprehensive histories, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater (revised and expanded 2018), for McIntosh County, and From Beautiful Zion to Red Bird Creek (2000), for Bryan County. The latter volume received the Georgia Historical Society's Hawes Award for Georgia's outstanding work of local history. In addition to the current monograph, his most recent books are A Georgia Tidewater Companion: Essays, Papers and Some Personal Observations on 30 Years of Research in Coastal Georgia History (2014), Sapelo: People and Place on a Georgia Sea Island (2017), Environmental Influences on Life & Labor in McIntosh County, Georgia (2018), Thomas Spalding, Antebellum Planter of Sapelo (2019), Life & Labor on Butler's Island: Rice Cultivation in the Altamaha Delta (2019), Blackbeard Island, A History (2019), Native American & Spanish Influences on McIntosh County, Georgia: An Archaeological Perspective (2019), and, forthcoming, Twentieth Century Sapelo Island: Howard E. Coffin & Richard J. Reynolds, Jr. (2020), Harris Neck & Its Environs: Land Use and Landscape in North McIntosh County (2020), Postbellum Sapelo Island: The Reconstruction Journal of Archibald Carlisle McKinley (2020), Early Families of McIntosh County, Georgia, 1736 to 1861 (2021), and An Atlas of McIntosh County History (2021). Sullivan has contributed 12 articles to the online New Georgia Encyclopedia, and wrote the coastal chapter for The New Georgia Guide (1996). He was director of the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve from 1993 to 2013 and is now an independent writer and consultant living on his ancestral land overlooking the marshes and waters of Cedar Point in McIntosh County.