IBERTY COUNTY, GA - BIOS -George Walton Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: lat@wayxcable.com Bob Hurst Table of Contents page: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/liberty.htm Georgia Table of Contents: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm GEORGE WALTON LED GEORGIA’S CONTROVERSIAL `LIBERTY BOYS’ SUNBURY CEMETERY HIDDEN IN ITS FOREST SETTING SERVES AS A LAST RESTING PLACE FOR REVOLUTIONARY SETTLERS Rev. William McWhir, Noted Early Educator, Is Buried Here MIDWAY CHURCH STANDS AS REMINDER OF A PURITAN PAST IN GEORGIA Early Midway-Area Pioneers Stood Staunchly For Their Massachusetts Heritage By Robert Latimer Hurst (EDITOR'S NOTE: As we move toward July 4 and further realize that we are in the First Terrorist War, patriotism should be a force renewed in all of us. It might be that reflecting on those who went before in our own locale help with that renewal.) The subject of the first installment of this series, Dr. Lyman Hall, a judge in Savannah during the latter part of his life, eventually moved to Burke County and lived on a plantation overlooking the Savannah River. Here, in 1790, he died and was interred in a brick vault on the bluff of the river. In 1848, Georgia had the remains removed to Augusta so that he could rest beside his friend George Walton, another Georgian who signed the Declaration of Independence. Noted as the youngest of the signers, Walton, a native of Virginia, began to work as an apprentice to a builder as soon as he was of age. His parents dead, the young man found indentured service a necessary step for his aunt and uncle to take. At 19, in 1769, he moved to Savannah to study law. Three years passed before he was admitted before the general court of the province. But for Walton it was the beginning of a very prosperous law practice, historian reports. Now, at 24, he prided himself as a leader in Georgia's version of New England's Sons of Liberty. Calling themselves the "Liberty Boys," these youths held as their major purpose, and the first item on their agenda, harassing the British. Walton’s name was found, in 1774, on a list for a call to a meeting in Tondee's Tavern in Savannah; this call, it is recorded, became the rallying point for the first gathering of Georgians who supported American rights. Some called them “rebels”; others secretly condoned their actions but said little, while a third group applauded these fellows openly. Acting very much like the perpetrators of a fraternity initiation, these “Liberty Boys” searched and found those who showed favor toward the king. They wanted to stir up feelings for the coming Revolution; they wanted Georgia to wake up. Yes, they could have been termed “agitators.” John Hopkins, a sailor evidently loyal to the king, had made an “impertinent remark about the colonies’ revolt,” tells Historian Bernice McCullar. He became a target and an example for the group’s wrath, which turned into a tarring and feathering; then the young Royalist was made to kiss the Liberty Pole and to recite an apology as well: “Damnation to all Tories and success to the cause of American liberty!” Now serving as secretary of the Provincial Congress, Walton, showing great leadership ability, soon found himself president of the Council of Safety, a "committee that took care of all the affairs for the young state of Georgia," add Georgian historians. In January, 1776, the provincial assembly selected him one of the delegates to the Continental Congress. Arriving in Philadelphia a few days before the approval of a document that would change all Americans-to-be lives and be known as the Declaration of Independence, Walton, at 26, the youngest delegate of any state-to-be, signed the paper. He would, then, serve in the Continental Congress until 1777, but he desired to return to Georgia to take an active role in government and its military operations. Three months after his marriage to Dorothy Camber of Savannah, British forces captured this city. George was seriously wounded during the fray and taken prisoner. Later, he would praise a British doctor for saving his life. He was immediately sent to the little but growing village of Sunbury on the coast near Midway. Here, he remained a prisoner of war until he was exchanged in 1779 for a British naval captain. Walton, during that same year, was elected governor by the state assembly in Augusta, even though the British still held Savannah in a tight grip. A few months late, a new move was made by the colony's legislature: Walton was reappointed to the Continental Congress, serving until 1781. He stayed in Philadelphia until the war's end in 1783. Another new position as chief justice came to Walton in the mid 1780s, requiring him to become a circuit rider for the superior courts twice a year. Again, he served as governor until the state adopted a constitution. He, in 1791, welcomed President George Washington to Augusta and performed his last duties as a replacement for Senator James Jackson and as a district judge. He died in Augusta in 1804 and is interred beneath the Signers' Mounument in Augusta next to his friend Dr. Lyman Hall. In Sunbury, public burial was assigned to the southeast corner of Church Square. Here the remains of those settlers who made up Coastal Georgia were laid to rest in what was to become Sunbury Cemetery. Another burying site would be designated across from the Midway Congregational Church, founded by those staunch Puritans from Massachusetts. Both sites would, in time, become historic locales because of the personalities that lived or passed this way and the events that happened here underlining American colonists striving for independence. Sunbury Cemetery, in its forest setting, lost most of its markers to time and weather by 1870, but those that remain tell their stories. The oldest appears to be one dated 1788, the most recent 1911. One finds the archaic designed iron- fenced family plots for the Durham and the Fleming-Law families denotes that earlier time and, perhaps, the most noted tombstone is a full-length marker for the Rev. William McWhir, the preacher and school administrator for the noted Sunbury Academy. The Midway Church, standing tall in the bend of U.S. #17, gives the first appearance of a New England structure in a New England village until one notes the ancient pines and oaks dripping with moss. Although the present two-storied, white wooden structure, with its tall steeple, seems to image an edifice of long, long ago, that first building was burned by British troops during the Revolution. And, according to those Royalists, they had a good reason: here, they asserted, was the “breeding ground for Revolutionary War leaders.” And cited were the Georgia signers of the Declaration of Independence among others. Sunbury would serve as county seat, losing out to Riceboro in 1797. Many, who had left during the British occupation, had not returned, and others were moving into the interior for agricultural reasons, deserting that which had been European-fashioned towns. Midway would continue, with those Puritan descendants sending their sons and, today, their daughters to Yale, Harvard and Princeton.