#109: The Trustees’ Garden near Mad Anthony's Fort Wayne

"No American commander has ever displayed greater energy and daring, a more resolute courage, or readier resource, than the chief of the hard-fighting Revolutionary generals, Mad Anthony Wayne."

—Theodore Roosevelt

The Trustees’ Garden near Mad Anthony's Fort Wayne

Savannah Founder James Oglethorpe established the Trustees’ Garden in 1734, only a year after the founding of the Georgia Colony and its naming to honor King George II of Great Britain.

Georgia was the last of America's Thirteen Colonies to be established. When Oglethorpe traveled seventeen miles up the Savannah River from the Atlantic Ocean, seeking the best spot to establish the colony, he was met on the Yamacraw Bluff by John Musgrove and his wife Coosaponekeesa, the daughter of a Creek Indian mother and French father. She took on the persona of Mary Musgrove.

The Musgrove's ran a successful Indian trading post on the southern banks of the Savannah River. John was the namesake of an Indian Trader residing in South Carolina, while Mary became essential in securing land rights for the Georgia Colony from Yamacraw Chief Tomochichi. For several years, she played the critical role as General Oglethorpe's interpreter, negotiating with Creek Natives in the area.

When Oglethorpe returned to Great Britain in 1734 to report to the Trustees and introduce Tomochichi to the King and Queen of England, the Musgrove's accompanied the voyage. Mary lived three decades longer than her husband, becoming one of the wealthiest women on the Georgian frontier.

The story of the Trustees' Garden lives on as an ironic symbol of the failure of James Oglethorpe's economic project in the Georgia Colony. Modeled after English botanical gardens located back in Oxford and Chelsea, the plan was for Georgia's settlers to grow mulberry trees with seedlings from the Trustees' Garden and become silkworm farmers for export back to the Mother Country.

But the Georgian climate was unsuitable for such purposes. Other experiments in chestnut and olive trees and growing grapes for wine, hemp, flax, and other exotic medicinal plants failed, as well. Georgia's original blueprint for building a utopia of small yeoman farmers without slavery looked doable on paper. Still, it proved too challenging to fulfill by those who initially stepped on its ground.

The Trustees' Garden symbolizes a group of philanthropic experts who made plans for others in total ignorance of what was agriculturally possible to accomplish in Georgia by actual people living in its environment. The volunteer philanthropists in London — dreaming of helping England grow rich by sending her poor abroad to Georgia — had genuine optimistic charitable intentions, broken only by a naïve understanding of the land they helped to colonize and the people they sent to do so.

Still, the colonialists of Georgia well-served and accomplished its other mission: to become a military buffer between the English colonies to the north and the Spanish empire to the south.

Look just a stone's throw east of the Trustee's Garden to find the remnants of one of Savannah's oldest military installations: Fort Wayne. Originally known as Fort Halifax, then rebuilt by the British in 1779 after they captured Savannah (renaming it Fort Provost), this fort dates to the mid-18th century. It became Fort Wayne after 1782, named for Revolutionary War hero General ‘Mad Anthony' Wayne, who’d been granted 1134 acres outside of Savannah in reward for his dedicated military service. Wayne failed in Savannah as a Southern Planter. He was recalled from civilian life by George Washington to fight in the Northwest Indian War against a confederation of British-backed Indian tribes. Mad Anthony was successful at the Battle of Fallen Timbers — as a result, Fort Wayne in Indiana also bears his name.