IBERTY COUNTY, GA - BIOS -George Walton

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Archives by: lat@wayxcable.com  Bob Hurst


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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.