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{14} chapter one A Lowcountry Experiment Creating a Transatlantic Wormsloe on november 16, 1732, the ship Anne departed England for the New World. The vessel’s crew and 115 passengers were bound for the southeastern coast of British North America, for a strip of land between the colony of South Carolina and Spanish Florida where they intended to found a new colony: Georgia. This colonial project was the result of the efforts of a group of twenty-one “ministers, merchants, and parliamentarians”—collectively referred to as the Trustees—intent on creating a new sort of outpost in the Americas. The Trustees envisioned an idyllic and idealistic colony with three principal aims: the Trustees and the English Crown intended Georgia to be a humanitarian colony that would provide opportunities for the expanding English lower class, serve as a buffer between Spanish settlements in Florida and English Carolina, and produce lucrative commodities such as wine and silk. Historian James Cobb has labeled these aims a “seemingly ideal combination of philanthropy, capitalism, and national interest.” Among the Anne’s passengers was Noble Jones, a physician and architect from Surrey County, just south of London. Jones was among the wealthiest of the colonists aboard the Anne, and he traveled with his wife, Sarah; daughter, Mary; and son, Noble Wimberly . After a brief stop in Charleston, South Carolina, the colonists sailed southward, arriving at their destination on a bluff above the south bank of the Savannah River on February 12, 1733. The Joneses and their fellow travelers landed in a Lowcountry environment far different than the English countryside they left behind. They immediately set about changing this stretch of the New World; at the same time, the Georgia coast would alter their thinking about environments across the globe. The colonists found their preferred site along the Savannah already occupied . A group of several hundred Creek Indians known as the Yamacraw, led by their chief, Tomochichi, lived in a village on the bluff, the last signi ficant section of high ground before the river wends its way through vast tidal marshes and empties into the Atlantic. Through a series of negotiations, James Oglethorpe, the sole Trustee to accompany the settlers, obtained for the a lowcountry experiment {15} Georgia colony the rights to all of the land within thirty miles of the Atlantic between the southern bank of the Savannah and the Altamaha River. The agreement set aside a village site for the Yamacraw six miles upriver from the colony, and Oglethorpe promised to restrict settler agriculture and timbering to the ceded lands. With the support of the Yamacraw and a relatively secure site, the colonists set about constructing a town that suited the Trustees’ ideals. Part of the allure of the Georgia Colony for England’s poor was access to free land. Jones, like his fellow colonists, received one Savannah house lot, a five-acre garden on the outskirts of town, and a forty-five-acre farm beyond the garden belt. In return for this land, he promised to clear and fence at least ten acres, to plant one hundred white mulberry trees to feed silkworms, and not to employ slaves. As these strictures made clear, the Trustees founded the colony with specific ideas about the ways in which settlers ought to interact with the American environment. Oglethorpe and his fellow administrators believed that Englishmen and -women ought to “improve” the southern landscape . Founders charged the settlers with producing agricultural commodities for the mercantile economy of the Atlantic world, and the Trustees also believed that this labor on the land would reform and improve the colonists. Well-off colonists such as Jones could also apply to the Trustees for additional five-hundred-acre plantations more distant from Savannah by demonstrating an ability to cultivate the land, an ability proven by transporting at least ten indentured servants to Georgia. Jones was among the first colonists to request an outlying plantation, presumably after fulfilling these requirements, when he selected a plot of ground along the Skidaway River southeast of town. In 1736, Oglethorpe leased the plantation to Jones. (The Trustees did not grant any property outright.) He named his new estate Wormsloe and immediately set about building a home and carving out a farm on the land. Jones recorded no reason for the unusual plantation name. Subsequent speculation tends to attribute the moniker to a similarly named location in southern England or to Jones’s hope that silkworms would flourish on the site...

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