Historical Background about the Brunswick, Georgia and Glynn County, Georgia Real Estate Market

Brunswick is the county seat of Glynn County.  This quaint port city was founded in 1771 and named for the ancestral home of King George II.

The area’s first European settler was Mark Carr, a captain in General James Oglethorpe’s Marine Boat Company.  He established a plantation in 1738 on 1,000 acres fronting the Turtle River.  In 1771, the Royal Province of Georgia bought Carr’s land, an area known as Plug Point, and laid out the town of Brunswick.  The town was designed in the grid style, following General Oglethorpe’s design for the City of Savannah.  In 1797, the Georgia General Assembly transferred the Glynn County seat from Frederica on St. Simons Island to the town of Brunswick.

After its designation as county seat, Brunswick grew very little.  The first public building, Glynn Academy, was built in 1819 and closed four years later due to lack of attendance.

In 1826, the General Assembly granted title to much of the undeveloped town to Urbanus Dart and William R. Davis.  The City soon had a courthouse, a jail, and about 30 houses and stores.  In order to connect the city with the plantations located inland, Dart and Davis, along with Thomas Butler King of Retreat Plantation on St. Simons Island, formed a company to construct a canal from the Brunswick River north to the Altamaha River.  About this time, Thomas Butler King founded the Brunswick and Florida Railroad and commissioned a survey of the route.

The city was incorporated in 1836, a newspaper was started in 1838 and a new bank opened.  The Altamaha-Brunswick Canal opened in 1854, followed by the railroad in 1856.  By the start of the Civil War, Brunswick had a population of almost 500 people.

During the Civil War, wharves were burned, as were several buildings.  When the city was ordered to evacuate, most of the citizens fled to Waynesville.  The canal and railroads ceased operation and Brunswick was abandoned.

After the Civil War, like St. Simons Island, the city and surrounding areas suffered terribly.  However, with the establishment of the Anson Gould’s lumber mill on St. Simons Island, economic recovery began. Commerce along the canals and rivers was supplemented by railroads connecting the port of Brunswick to the inland cities of Atlanta and Macon.  The turpentine industry, railroading and shipping became mainstays of the economy following the Civil War, as Brunswick became an international port of some consequence.  The last decade of the nineteenth century saw Jekyll Island, “Brunswick by the Sea” become a posh, ultra-exclusive location for the era’s most influential families.  In 1888, the Oglethorpe Hotel opened and tourists arrived by the hundreds.  Sidney Lanier, Georgia’s Poet Laureate, sought relief from tuberculosis in the coastal climate and immortalized the area in his poem, “The Marshes of Glynn.”

The port continued to expand at the turn of the century with ever-increasing commerce in lumber, naval stores, oysters and cotton.  The economic boom created the magnificent Victorian homes in downtown Brunswick.

The city survived a major hurricane in 1898, which put much of the area under water.  During World War II, the city became an important shipyard, producing over 100 Liberty Ships.  Following the war, pulp, paper and food processing became major commodities.  Brunswick, like many small cities across the southeast, experienced a slow, steady decline in its central business district in the last half of the twentieth century, as middle and upper-income residents migrated to the suburbs.  However, Brunswick is one of 43 MainStreet cities in Georgia, with an exciting new master plan designed to foster sustained growth in the next decade.  This renewed interest in preserving and restoring the Victorian atmosphere of the city has caused numerous retail and antique shops to return to the community’s original shopping district.