Less than two months after British forces captured Savannah in December 1778, patriot militiamen scored a rare Revolutionary War victory in Georgia after a short but violent gunbattle forced British loyalists to abandon a small fort built on a frontiersman’s cattle farm.
More than 234 years later, archaeologists say they’ve pinpointed the location of Carr’s Fort in northeastern Georgia after a search with metal detectors covering more than 4 square miles turned up musket balls and rifle parts, as well as horse shoes and old frying pans.
The February 1779 shootout at Carr’s Fort turned back men sent to Wilkes County to recruit colonists loyal to the British army. It was also a prelude to the more prominent battle of Kettle Creek, where the same patriot fighters who attacked the fort went on to ambush and decimate an advancing British force of roughly 800 men.
The battles were a blow to British plans to make gains in Georgia, the last of the original 13 Colonies, and other Southern settlements by bolstering their ranks with colonists sympathetic to the crown.
“The war was going badly up north for the British, so they decided to have a Southern campaign and shipped a huge amount of troops down here and started recruiting loyal followers,” said Dan Elliott, the Georgia-based archaeologist who found the fort with a team from the nonprofit research group the LAMAR Institute. “Kettle Creek was probably the best victory that the Georgians ever had in the Revolutionary War. Most battles were failures, like the capture of Savannah.”
Carr’s Fort was one of numerous small outposts on the Colonial frontier built for American settlers to defend themselves against enemy soldiers and hostile Indians.
Robert Carr was a cattle farmer who settled with his wife, children and a single middle-age female slave in Wilkes County after colonists started arriving there in 1773. Carr also served as captain of a militia company of roughly 100 men. Responsible for leading his militiamen and looking out for their families, Carr built a stockade wall to protect his farmhouse and surrounding property, which included shacks and crude shelters.
Though probably no larger in area than a tennis court, Carr’s Fort would have needed to hold 300 or more people, said Robert Scott Davis, a history professor at Wallace State Community College in Alabama who has studied and written about Wilkes County’s role in the American Revolution since the 1970s.
“Most of the forts on the frontier were small community affairs,” Davis said. “Everybody in the militia compan
Surviving records from the Revolution gave general landmarks but no precise location for Carr’s Fort. Elliott last year won a $68,500 grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefields Protection Program to attempt to find the fort’s remains.
Elliott set out with a six-person team in January, scouring an area of more than 4 square miles that was believed most likely to have included Carr’s land. The search turned up no signs of the battle until a month later, when Elliott’s team started finding musket balls on a remote plot of planted pine. A dozen of the old bullets were recovered, as well as parts of 18th century hunting rifles favored by militiamen.
Elliott said his team returned in March and April to make sure of their findings before announcing them last week. Though he’s still searching for any remaining signs of the fort’s stockade walls, he said the battle site was essentially pinpointed through the process of elimination.
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