Brunswick, Georgia

The area’s first European settler, Mark Carr, arrived in 1738. Carr, a Scotsman, was a captain in General James Oglethorpe’s Marine Boat Company. Upon landing, he established his 1,000-acre tobacco plantation along the Turtle River. The Royal Province of Georgia purchased Carr’s fields in 1771 and laid out the town of Brunswick in the grid style following Oglethorpe’s Savannah Plan. The town was then named after the duchy of Brunswick - Lüneburg in Germany; the ancestral home of King George II of Great Britain. Brunswick was abandoned during the Civil War when citizens were ordered to evacuate. Our city, like many others in the South, suffered from post-war depression. After one of the nation’s largest lumber mills began operation on nearby St. Simons Island, economic prosperity returned. Rail lines were constructed from Brunswick to inland Georgia, and unlike many other southern cities during the Reconstruction period, Brunswick experienced an economic boom.