Untitled - the Digital Library of Georgia

402 GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS
the Ogeechee in what is now Bryan. Most of the early settlers of this
county were of Puritan origin, belonging to the old Midway settlement.
Warren was laid off from Richmond, Columbia and Wilkes and
named for Dr. Joseph Warren, a Revolutionary patriot, who fell at Bun
ker Hill. Warrenton was designated as the county-seat. Most of the
county's early settlers were from Virginia. One of these, John Cobb
or Cobbs, was an ancestor of the Cobbs of Athens. Here in after years
was born the great Judge Lamar, author "Lamar's Digest" and father
of the noted Federal jurist who bore the same odd name. Here was
cradled also the great orator of secession, William L. Yancey, of Alabama.
Montgomery was laid off from Washington and named for Gen.
Richard Montgomery, an early martyr of independence, who fell on
the heights of Quebec. Mount Vernon, the seat of government, was
named for Washington's renowned home on the Potomac River. The
original settlers of Montgomery were chiefly Scotch-Irish Presbyterians
whose ancestors had been banished for adhering to the cause of the
Stuarts. Most of them came directly from North Carolina and were
.kinsmen of the men who in 1775 signed the Mecklenburg Declaration
of Independence.
But the rapid growth of settlements on the frontier belt of Georgia,
while indicating a healthy increase of population and a wholesome infu
sion of rich blood, exposed the state at this time to the avaricious greed
of designing schemers, who resorted to down-right trickery in victimiz
ing innocent settlers. To this period of the state's history belong the
Pine Barren frauds. We need not concern ourselves with details; but
in some way these sharpers obtained fictitious grants to immense areas
of land, in the unsettled parts of Georgia, chiefly along the Oconee River,
where the undulating hills were densely wooded with pines. These
tracts are today embraced in Montgomery, Wheeler, Laurens, Emanuel
and Johnson counties, all of which formed a part of the old parent
County of Washington. We blush to record the fact, but, in some way,
these land pirates, managed to acquire what seemed to be bona fide
grants, to which the great seal of the state was affixed, conveying to
them vast tracts of land, not one acre of which had been legally
secured, not one acre of which belonged to them by right, but which rep
resented in the aggregate over 7,000,000 acres, in the rich heart of
the Georgia midlands. If any one is specially interested in this chapter
of Georgia's history, we refer him to Absalom H. Chappell's little
volume of "Miscellanies," a rare work now out of print but still to be
found in old libraries. Of course, hundreds of conveyances .made at this
time were perfectly legal, but so widespread was the mischief caused
by these fraudulent land grants that all the large conveyances of 1794
and 1795 were afterwards repudiated because of the suspicion of fraud
which they aroused. According to Doctor Smith, as late 'as the year
1899 men have appeared in Georgia with old grants to land which never
existed. These grants were all supposed to be located in Washington,
chiefly in what was afterwards Montgomery, Emanuel, Johnson and
Laurens counties; but in the aggregate they represented more land than
all the county contained. Whenever one of these spurious documents
was brought to light it was promptly repudiated by the state and no
lands were actually taken under them, but the speculators who had