Before 1800

Millions of years ago, the Ocmulgee emptied into a sea that covered the Coastal Plain. To this day Macon schoolchildren still search the ancient seabeds (kaolin quarries) for whale and shark teeth. With time and climatic change, the sea receded, exposing the plain. Where waves once lapped the higher plateau runs the fall line that separates the hills of the Piedmont Plateau from the lowlands of the Coastal Plain.

Above Macon the once fertile Piedmont Plateau sustained ancient and modern agriculture. Today the Piedmont Wildlife Refuge is protecting and restoring more than thirty-five thousand acres of old, soil-depleted cotton fields to a forested plateau.

Down river from Macon is the Coastal Plain’s primeval Bond Swamp. In contrast to the Piedmont but just as important, the five thousand-acre Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge protects sensitive black water plant and animal life. The Ocmulgee/Oconee/Altamaha River—a river basin totally within the confines of Georgia—provides fresh water to both human and marshland habitats of Georgia’s barrier islands.

Between plateau and plain, the fall line with fordable river crossings forms a natural overland transportation route. The first to discover the convenience of the fall line were herds of mastodons and bison. And then twelve thousand years ago, with a gasp of wonder, the first human nomad spied the Ocmulgee at the fall line.

With only our imagination and artifacts to tell their story, Paleo-Indian, Woodland, and Mississippians followed the well-worn path from the west.¹ Early Mississippians, also known as the “Corn Farmers,” arrived among these hills on the Ocmulgee at the fall line around 900 AD. The name of the mound builders’ city has been lost, but evidence remains of the grandeur of their civilization. William Bartram in 1774 wrote in his diary of the abandoned ancient mounds:

…On the heights of these low grounds are yet visible monuments, or traces of an ancient town, such as artificial mounts or terraces, squares and banks, encircling considerable areas. Their old fields and planting land extend up and down the river, fifteen or twenty miles from these sites.² 

A rendezvous with destiny changed life on the Ocmulgee at the fall line in 1540. The first Europeans—Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto and his band of conquistadors—arrived looking for gold. Jesuit priests performed the first Christian baptism recorded in North America in the Ocmulgee River. But, as the Conquistadors moved on without treasure, they left immune-less Indians with unintended European diseases.

The Muscogee—dominant of twelve related tribes, later known as “Creeks”—migrated from the west and settled upon the banks of the Ocmulgee near the now-abandoned Mississippian Mounds. Defeating and assimilating the indigenous people, the Muscogee centered their culture on nearby Lamar Mound. William Bartram reports that Ocmulgee was remarkable as the first settlement “which they sat down,” as the Muscogee termed it, after emigrating from land beyond the Mississippi River. Ocmulgee is Muscogee for “bubbling waters,” named for a sacred river source of “Indian Springs” upriver.

European rivalry and hegemony in seventeenth-century America between the British settlements in Carolina, the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana produced conflict. The British Royal Carolina Colony, founded in 1670 with the coastal city of Charles Town, sought Muscogee influence and trade on their frontier. In 1690 the British built an outpost at Ocmulgee on the fall line trail at this time known as the ‘lower Creek trading path’. For more than a generation, the outpost sheltered soldiers, adventurers, trappers, and traders amongst the Muscogee.

In the 1715 Yamasee War, various Creek tribes allied themselves with British and Spanish interests. During the conflict, the British destroyed the Ocmulgee outpost and drove the Muscogee from the area.

To the south—and much to the relief of Carolinians—General James Oglethorpe founded the new Royal Colony of Georgia by establishing Savannah in 1733. The Ocmulgee River was described in King George’s grant as “the western boundary.” Oglethorpe camped beside the Ocmulgee Mounds in 1739 on his way to treaty talks with the Creek Nation gathered on the Chattahoochee River.

During the War for American Independence of 1776, most Creeks favored the British over the American colonists. Nevertheless Georgia, one of thirteen original colonies, became the fourth state to join the fledgling United States of America in 1788. With improvements, the Lower Creek Trading Path became known as the Federal Road as ever-increasing numbers of frontier soldiers and settlers migrated west from Augusta toward the American frontier of Ocmulgee.