Baldwin County GaArchives History .....History of Baldwin Co. - Oconee Town 1925
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 October 5, 2004, 5:25 pm

Oconee Town
Mrs J. L. Walker

    It would be futile for one to attempt the writing of a condensed story of
Oconee, the once important Indian town of Baldwin County. From various sources
of Indian lore, enough information is available, of the happenings there, to
fill a book. Oconee Town was the nucleus about which the Seminole nation grew.
This town was located on the banks of the Oconee river about four miles south of
the land on which Milledgeville is built, and not far from Rock Landing, a noted
Indian Council Rock. There is quite a readable and tracable history in various
books about Oconee, but only a short sketch of this town will be included in
this article.

    There were several ways in which the name of Oconee was spelled. It was once
written Ukwu'nu, or Ukwu'ni, but the similarity may be merely a coincidence
Pareja called it Ocony, while Ibarra, Ocone. The French and Spanish settlers
were frequent visitors to Oconee Town and each pronounced it in their own
tongue, but Oconee out lived the other names and altho the old town died, the
beautiful Oconee river on whose banks the town was situated still bears the
musical name given it by the Indians.

    When the Spanish first settled in this country the church of Rome gave
authority to the Brotherhood of St. Dominic to prosecute the work of
Christianizing and evangelizing "the heathen people," of the Atlantic Coast,
from St. Augustine northward to the Virginia line. There was a motive behind the
movement, that of establishing churches in the Indian settlement, for in that
way the Spanish hoped to increase their power in the New World. They located
missions in the most important Indian towns and Oconee was one of the towns in
which a mission was organized. The

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p. 48

house of worship was built in 1680 and was called "San Francisco de Oconee.”

    In a letter dated March 11,1695, Governor Laurea-no de Torres Ayala (Spanish
Governor of Florida), tells of an expedition consisting of four hundred Indians
and seven Spaniards sent against Oconee in retaliation for attacks made on
Spanish Indians. They only captured fifty persons, as the Indian town on the
Oconee river was almost deserted.

    William Bartram in his "Travels of 1792 through Georgia," described the
location of his encampment fixed on the site of the old Oconee Town, "which
about sixty years ago was evacuated by the Indians, who finding their situation
disagreeable because of its vicinity to the white people, left it, moving upward
into the nation or Upper Creeks, and there built a town; but that situation not
suiting their roving dispositions, they grew sickly and tired of it and resolved
to seek an habitation more agreeable to their minds." They moved to the
extensive plains of Alachua, Florida, and built a town on the banks of a lake
and named it Cuscowilla.

    General Benjamin Hawkins in his "Sketch of 1799" describes Oconee as a
deserted Indian town, whose settlers had moved six miles below Pa-la-chooc-le,
on the left bank of the Chattahoche, they named their new town "Little Oconee"
in honor of their home near Rock Landing.

    We know that the removal of this tribe of Indians from the Oconee River took
place like so many other removals in this region, just after the Yamasee
outbreak of 1716 and the movement into Florida about 1750. The name of the chief
who presided over the tribe at Oconee Town, and who was frequently called on to
hold councils at Rock Landing was known as Oneekachumpa, but called by the
English, Long King.

    The town census in 1750 gives the number of men living at Oconee as 30;
census of 1760, 50 men, census

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p. 49

of 1761, 50 hunters. The census taken of the remaining towns of the "Creek
Confederacy" during the years of the Indian occupancy were drawn from the
Spanish, French and English trading lists. Taitt, Marbury and Benjamin Hawkins
took the census of 1832, and at that time found no one living in the once
important Indian town of Oconee.


Additional Comments:
From: 

Part I

HISTORY of BALDWIN COUNTY GEORGIA
BY MRS. ANNA MARIA GREEN COOK

ILLUSTRATED
ANDERSON. S. C.
Keys-Hearn Printing Co.
-1925—


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