Frontier Fort Found: Fort Carr, Important During Revolutionary War, Found In Georgia

Frontier Fort found from Revolutionary War battle: Archeologists have discovered a frontier fort in Georgia from the Revolutionary War.

At the last minute of the search for a missing fort, archeologists found Fort Carr, a frontier fort involved in the Revolutionary War, in Northeastern Georgia. During the Revolutionary War, Captain Robert Carr turned his frontier home into a fort for more than 100 Patriot soldiers.

Daniel Elliott, President of the LAMAR Institute, said in a press release, "The search for Carr's Fort was like looking for a needle in a haystack, only harder. We had no map and few descriptions of the fort, so its location was entirely unknown."

Surviving maps and accounts from the Revolution gave a few general landmarks for Carr's fort, but no precise location. Last year, Elliott last year won a $68,500 grant from the National Park Service's American Battlefields Protection Program for his nonprofit, the LAMAR institute, to try to find the fort's site. The team set out in January to scour an area of about four square miles that they thought may have included Carr's land, but they were unable to find any remnants of the battle or the fort. But the research team didn't have success - they were running out of funding. Luckily, the site was found, Elliott said, "on the last hour of the last day of the field project."

A month into their search, Elliott's team found a few musket balls near pine trees that had clearly been planted. They turned up about a dozen in all, then parts of an 18th century hunting rifle of a type often favored by militiamen. Other things started turning up: horseshoes, door hinges, buttons, wagon parts.  A King George's half-penny coin from the 1770s.

Elliott said his team went back to the site during March and April to make sure of the findings they announced last week. They haven't found signs of stockade walls, which would have been necessary in the fort, but believes that via the process of elimination the battle site has been found. No other remnants of any battle were found in the 2,700 acres surrounding the site they've pinpointed.

A group of Tory Loyalists once occupied Carr's Fort during a campaign by the British to recruit settlers over to the Loyalist side. 200 Georgia and South Carolina Patriot militia laid siege and engaged in a gun battle. After that, the Patriots went off to fight a larger British force, leading up to the better-known Battle of Kettle Creek, and took the Loyalist soldiers' horses with them. This forced the Loyalists to march several hundred miles back to the main British forces.

Elliott said that the artifacts they had discovered from Carr's fort are being cleaned before being given to the University of Georgia.