Bryan County, on the Georgia coast just south
and west of Savannah, was created from Chatham County by an act
of the state legislature on December 19, 1793. In 1794 land from
Effingham County was also transferred to Bryan. The county was
named in honor of Jonathan Bryan, one of the leading colonial
settlers in Georgia and a key figure in the colony's movement
toward independence and during the Revolutionary War (1775-83).
In
1733 Fort Argyle was built on the Ogeechee River, on land that
later became part of Bryan County, by Georgia
founder James
Oglethorpe. In
1754 the town of Georgetown was laid out on the lower Ogeechee
by Royal Governor John Reynolds, but the anticipated deep-water
port never came to fruition, because attention was focused on
more established commercial markets at Savannah and Sunbury.
Georgetown was renamed Hardwicke by Governor Reynolds in 1755.
Bryan
County was the scene of large-scale agricultural development
during the antebellum period. The Ogeechee River basin in lower
Bryan County became one of the most productive rice-growing areas
on the south Atlantic coast during the 1830s and 1840s. By 1855,
3 million pounds of rice annually were being shipped from Bryan
County plantations. The leading producers of this important staple
commodity on the Ogeechee were Richard J. Arnold, George W. McAllister,
and Thomas Savage Clay.
The rice industry was enhanced by two
important transportation developments affecting Bryan County—the
construction of the sixteen-mile-long Savannah-Ogeechee Canal
in 1830, which
provided the area's rice plantations with a direct market link
to Savannah, and the building of the Savannah,Union Soldiers
Albany, and Gulf Railroad two decades later. The railroad was
completed through the lower end of Bryan County in 1856, leading
to the founding of Ways Station, later Richmond Hill, near the
Ogeechee River crossing.
In 1861 Confederate forces built Fort
McAllister at Genesis Point on the Ogeechee to protect from
Union forces the local river
plantations and the railroad just upstream. This simple earthworks
fort repelled seven Union naval attacks by Monitor-class warships
during 1862 and 1863. The fort and its outnumbered Confederate
garrison finally fell during a bloody landward assault in December
1864, at the end of General William T. Sherman's march to the
sea from Atlanta to Savannah.
With the development of railroads
and a rapidly expanding naval stores (primarily turpentine)
industry in the last two decades
of the
nineteenth century, town development in the upper section
of Bryan County began in earnest. Pembroke was founded as a railroad
town and turpentine-shipping center in 1890 and within a
decade
became the county's leading business center. In 1937 the
Bryan County seat was moved to Pembroke from the earlier county
seat
at Clyde, in the middle section of the county. Even earlier
seats were Cross Roads and Court House (later Eden).
Automotive
pioneer Henry Ford had a greater impact on Bryan County than
anyone else in the twentieth century. In 1925 Ford began
the purchase of what eventually would total 85,000 acres
of land
along the Ogeechee River in lower Bryan County. During
the 1930s and 1940s he established schools, industries, and medical
facilities
in the Ways Station area, thus greatly improving social
and
health conditions in an impoverished section of coastal
Georgia. In
1941 the town of Ways Station was renamed Richmond Hill
in honor of Ford, whose winter home, Richmond, was located on
the former
Ogeechee River rice tract of a century before.
With the
establishment of the Fort Stewart Military Reservation in 1940,
Bryan County lost more than one-third of its acreage
to the
U.S. government and was split into two sections, upper
and
lower.
The county seat, Pembroke, is in the upper portion of
the county, while Richmond Hill, the county's largest city,
is the coastal
south.
