Savannah Town, South Carolina

Savannah Town, South Carolina is a defunct settlement that was located in the colonial years on the Savannah River below the fall line in present-day Aiken County. In the 1670s the Westo had a village here, but they were displaced by the Savannah (as the English called a local Shawnee band) in a trade war, and it became known by 1685 as Savannah Town. The English colony had traders who did a lucrative business in dressed skins with the Savannah Shawnee. Fortified as a frontier post, the settlement developed and ferry service was established across the river. The town was gradually overtaken by its competitor of Augusta, Georgia, established in 1735 five miles upriver and closer to Indian settlements. Traders here intercepted commerce, sending it to their port of Savannah on the coast. By 1740 Savannah Town was declining, and by 1765 the village was abandoned and the fort closed.

Nearby Silver Bluff was the site in 1773-1775 of the first separate black congregation organized in the current United States; most were slaves. During the American Revolutionary War, when the British occupied Savannah, Georgia, most of the congregation members migrated to the city to gain freedom as promised by the British. Some were evacuated with the British in the last days of the war.

This settlement was first recorded by English colonists as a Westo village; they later recognized that the Savannah (Shawnee) displaced the Westo in a 1679-1680 trade war. Joel Gascoyne's 1685 Plat of the Province of Carolina showed the settlement by the name of Savannah Town (Cumming #101). The growing English colony considered Savannah Town important for its profitable Indian trade, and for frontier defense.

A thriving business developed around colonial traders, many of them Scots-Irish, who used pack horses to carry their goods and travel throughout Native American communities in what was then considered the interior, western wilderness away from Low Country settlements. In 1692 the South Carolina Proprietors expressed their hope that traders would reside at "Savannah town" (McCrady p. 237). In 1698, Colonel Thomas Welch reached the Mississippi River on a Native American trail, which came to be known as the Upper Trading Path to the Chickasaw homeland (Atkinson p. 25). Traders offered the Shawnee and other Indians iron and woolen goods in exchange for the dressed skins (mostly deer) which they shipped by the thousands from Savannah Town via oared 'periagoe' (pirogue in French) to Charles Town, and thence to Europe. The colonial authorities built Fort Moore nearby in 1715 and garrisoned it with perhaps twenty-five soldiers. In 1740 settlers established a ferry service across the Savannah River.

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