EFFINGHAM COUNTY

 

Effingham County is the fourth oldest county in the state of Georgia, having been created from the colonial parishes of St. Matthew and St. Philips in 1777.  The name honors Lord Effingham, an English champion of colonial rights and a nobleman who declined to fight the revolutionaries.

The county seat shifted several times before Springfield, the present site, was designated in the 1830s.  The state legislature made the settlement of Tuckasee-King, near the Screven County line, the first county seat.  This was the location, near the present town of Clyo, of a river ferry established by General Oglethorpe linking Tuckasee-King's Bluff in Georgia with Palachocolas settlements across the Savannah River in South Carolina.  This was an important link with northern overland trade paths.

 

In 1787, the county seat was moved to Elberton on the Ogeechee River at Indian Bluff.  A later legislature, meeting in the state capitol at Louisville in 1799, appointed five commissioners to lay out a new town to be known as Effingham.

 

Still another community, Ebenezer, served as county seat for about three years from 1796 to 1799.  Ebenezer had been founded in 1767, by Salzburgers from Germany.  They laid out their town on the pattern of Savannah, a quarter mile square containing a church, parsonage, academy, orphan house, market place, and public storehouse.  This was a thriving town at the start of the Revolution, and it was fortified by the Continental soldiers in 1776.  English Colonel Archibald Campbell successfully led his force against the town early in 1779, and held it until 1782.  During this time the church was used first as a hospital and then as a stable for English cavalry.  Ebenezer was a thoroughfare for English troops passing from Augusta to Savannah until recaptured by the Continentals in July 1782.  Ebenezer was the headquarters of General Anthony Wayne, the county seat, and, for a short period, the actual capital of Georgia.

 

Much of Effingham County was settled originally by the fifteen hundred Salzburgers who joined Oglethorpe in 1733.  They are known to have settled Bethany in 1751, with about 160 residents under the leadership of William DeBrahm.  About ten miles south of Ebenezer, they built another settlement called Goshen.  Ten other families established Abercorn.  None of the towns endured.