The Ambition and Legacy of the Brunswick–Altamaha Canal

This article was originally published in Discover Downtown Brunswick, a publication of The Brunswick News, Brunswick, GA.

I’m a Google Maps nerd. I love submitting recommendations for road fixes and adding missing

businesses. Waterways are notoriously hard to get corrected on Google Maps, but that doesn’t

stop me from trying. If you’ve looked at Brunswick’s winding creeks and noticed a long,

unnaturally straight waterway cutting from the Turtle River across high ground to the Altamaha

River, you’ve not found a Google mapping error. You’ve found one of Georgia’s most ambitious

early engineering projects—the Brunswick–Altamaha Canal.

The idea of linking Brunswick’s port to the Altamaha River dates to the 18th century. In a pre-

railroad age, rivers were the superhighways. The Altamaha already carried trade from Georgia’s interior forests and plantations, and Brunswick’s natural deep-water port gave it a shot at competing with Savannah and Darien. A canal could shorten transport times and cut costs for cotton and timber, turning Brunswick into a major export hub.

Thomas Butler King finally made the canal a reality

The first push came in 1798, when Glynn County merchants and plantation owners petitioned

for a canal connecting the Turtle and Altamaha rivers. That effort stalled, but Urbanus Dart,

Sr.— one of Brunswick’s first champions of internal improvements—kept the idea alive. He

secured an 1826 charter with William B. Davis for the Brunswick Canal and Railroad Company,

laying groundwork for later efforts. Disappointingly, Dart’s charter wasn’t realized. Instead, it

was wealthy plantation owner and skilled politician Thomas Butler King who finally made the

canal a reality. King secured a new charter in 1834 and brought in Boston investors to back the

venture. By 1836, work began.

The first shovels belonged to enslaved laborers leased from nearby plantations. Hired out when plantation work slowed, they earned nothing; their owners were paid instead. Progress was slow, tied to plantation schedules and brutal conditions. By the late 1830s, enslaved labor alone was deemed “unsatisfactory,” and Irish immigrants were recruited from Boston at about

twenty dollars a month and board. Overseers kept the two groups apart, fearing “tumults and

bloody bones.” Long days under a blazing sun, hacking through roots and clay, pushed everyone to exhaustion, and camps along the swampy route bred malaria and fever. It took nearly twenty years to dig the precise trenches and install oak-and-iron sluice gates to manage tides at either end.

An artistic impression of the canal just after it opened in 1854
based on a 1981 survey

Somewhere along that backbreaking work, laborers uncovered the bones of a Columbian

mammoth. Tragically some of the bones were lost in an 1846 fire, but one of the molars still

resides at the British Museum of Natural History.  The canal finally opened in June 1854. Timber, cotton, naval stores, and agricultural goods could now move directly from the Altamaha basin to Brunswick’s port. But history had other plans. The Atlantic & Gulf Railroad was already taking shape, and within six years rail transport had eclipsed canal traffic. Brunswick’s ambitious waterway, meant to transform inland trade, was nearly obsolete before it had a chance to thrive and soon lay virtually abandoned.

Even so, the canal never completely vanished. Portions of it are easily spied along Old Jesup

Road where it meets the aptly named Canal Road. The nearby Canal Crossing shopping center

also takes its name honestly. A 1980 University of Georgia archaeological study traced the

canal’s full path through pine hammocks and marsh, and a Glynn County survey the next year

confirmed that large, rural portions were still visible. Later fieldwork by the Historic American

Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record documented surviving tidal lock  structures and side channels in detail.

These days, it’s preservationists with the ambitious dreams - less about trade and more about

conservation. There’s growing interest in turning the canal corridor into a greenway—a project

that would create both a heritage trail and flood-resilience program all in one. It’s a fitting new

chapter. The Brunswick–Altamaha Canal was born of ambition, and even if it failed as a trade

route, it may yet find purpose in helping to protect and preserve the marshes it once cut

through.

A Portion of the Brunswick-Altamaha Canal is visible from Old Jesup Road at Canal Road