Archive for January, 2013
Rare ship found at Cumberland Island beach
January 19, 2013
Archaeologists Search for Carr’s Fort
January 7, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT: Daniel T. Elliott, The LAMAR Institute, Inc., P.O. Box 2992, Savannah, GA 31402
(706) 341-7796, dantelliott@gmail.com
Archaeologists Search for Carr’s Fort
(January 7, 2013, Savannah, Georgia)
A team of archaeologists and historians from the LAMAR Institute have launched a search for an elusive Revolutionary War battlefield site in the hills of northeastern Georgia. The battle took place on February 10, 1779, when Captain Robert Carr’s Fort was invaded by a group of about 70 loyalist recruits led by Colonel Jonathan Hamilton. Later that day, the fort was surrounded by Georgia and South Carolina militia, led by Colonel Andrew Pickens, who laid siege to the fortified loyalists. The siege of the fort lasted only a few hours before Pickens received word of a much larger party of Loyalist recruits who were advancing from South Carolina and he broke off the siege of Carr’s Fort to pursue a bigger target. Thus began a chain of military events that culminated in the decisive Patriot victory at Kettle Creek, only a few miles from Carr’s Fort. Several weeks later, Captain Carr was killed by a war party of loyalist Creek Indians, who burned down the fort.The institute received grant funds for the project from the National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program and the Kettle Creek Battlefield Association. The goal is to locate Captain Carr’s Georgia militia fort and delineate the battle that surrounded it. Today the area is a serene mixture of woodlands, pasture and scattered farms. The battlefield search is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, as no contemporary maps showing its location, nor any detailed written descriptions of the location of Carr’s Fort are known to exist. It could be anywhere in the Beaverdam Creek watershed of Wilkes County, Georgia, although historian Robert Scott Davis, Jr. has narrowed the potential search area considerably. A team of six archaeologists from the institute will comb more than 5,000 acres in Wilkes County with metal detectors as part of the search. Once potential targets have been located, the team will use other methods, including ground penetrating radar (GPR), traditional excavations and mapping to better define the battlefield site. Fieldwork begins in late January and last for about three weeks. Carr’s Fort was one of more than 30 similar militia forts that dotted the Wilkes County frontier during the American Revolution. The project’s leader, Daniel Elliott, notes that although the team may be unable to find its intended target, they have “several chances to win”, as two other forts and numerous Revolutionary War-era farmsteads lie within the team’s search area. Locating Carr’s Fort will be a major find, as none of the 30 forts in Wilkes County have been discovered archaeologically. A full report on the undertaking will be available to the public in 2014.
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Mister Soapstone 