The British Fort Prince George-Palachacola was built in 1723 on a bluff overlooking the Savannah River, about 50 miles from the river’s mouth. Fort Prince George, also known as Palachacola Fort, guarded the main route to Charles Town (present-day Charleston, South Carolina) from the south and southwest.
The fort was also the site of sporadic trading. The Yamasee Native Americans had acted as a defensive buffer in the southern and western parts of South Carolina until they rebelled in the Yamasee War (1715–1717).
Thus, Captain William Bellinger established Fort Prince George in 1723 at the site of the former Native American village of Palachacola to help bolster the colony’s defenses after the Yamasee lands had been confiscated. He also hoped to control unscrupulous traders of the sort that had provoked the Yamasees to rebellion.
At the time, the Carolinians were less concerned with the Spanish military threat than with the recent appearance of French forts and trading posts along the Gulf of Mexico and in Creek Country in Alabama.
Carolina Rangers, a semiprofessional military unit that guarded the southern frontier with mounted patrols, manned the fort. Fort Prince George was overshadowed by Fort Moore farther upstream when it came to trade. The new colony of Georgia, chartered in 1732 and encompassing the territory south of the Savannah River, had been claimed for some time by South Carolina.
Settlement began there in 1733, and Georgia took possession of the fort in 1735. Apparently, the fort was abandoned in 1742 during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1739– 1744, by which time the site would have lost much of its frontier defensive value and troops would have been needed on the Georgia- Florida frontier.
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Originally posted 2022-04-30 07:56:31.