Darien: On the Georgia Tidewater Loading Sea Island Cotton c. 1862

The port of Darien’s origins reach back to 1736 when a contingent of Scottish highlanders came to establish a military outpost at the outset of James Oglethorpe’s new Georgia colony. It was to grow into great prominence as a major south Atlantic seaport because of its strategic location on the Altamaha River delta.

It’s surrounding region was, by the mid 1800’s, one of the most prosperous rice growing regions of the south. Darien was a seaport that rivaled Savannah in commercial importance due to the prolific amounts of inland cotton rafted down the Altamaha to the waiting coastal vessels. The town’s status as a prominent rice and cotton shipping center gave the port a brief period of international significance, and several foreign countries even had consulates in the town. This lofty status went into a slow decline however, as more and more inland cotton began to be shipped to Savannah by rail following the advent of railroads in the 1840’s.

Waterborne transportation was then somewhat restricted by the shallows of tidal rivers and channels between the barrier islands. The majority of vessels using the port of Darien in the antebellum period were, therefore, coastal sloops and schooners. These vessels would also make stops at tidewater rice and cotton plantations while en route to greater commercial centers.

Darien continued to ship cotton until the town was burned by federal troops during a naval raid in June 1863. All the waterfront buildings and docks were destroyed and the port’s usefulness as an ideal departure point for Confederate blockade runners was thus effectively neutralized. Rebuilt after the Civil War, the town became a prosperous sawmill and lumber center, exporting more of this produce than any other seaport on the south Atlantic coast.

This scene, on a hot and hazy summer afternoon, shows the port in its heyday with its initial waterfront architecture. The view is from the shade of a live oak on the bluff. The buildings of the antebellum period were constructed of tabby, the popular and readily available tidewater building material comprised of oyster shells, quicklime, sand and water. In the foreground a tally man watches, from his shaded makeshift office, as a tops’l schooner takes on bales of cotton. Along the wharf a river steamboat rests prior to a voyage upriver to towns in the Georgia hinterland. Apart from the carefully preserved tabby ruins of the old warehouses, the only building in this scene which still exists today is the two storied, red-shuttered Strain Building, formerly a warehouse and chandlery, on the upper bluff.

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