Archaeologists have found the location of Carr's Fort, more than 234 years after the British forced captured Savannah, forcing British loyalists to retreat to the small fort on a frontiersman's cattle farm, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
The fort is located in northeastern Georgia. The archaeologists found it by searching with metal detectors over an area that was more than four square miles in diameter. The search resulted is artifacts such as musket balls and rifle parts, as well as horseshoes and frying pans.
The battle at Carr's Fort in February 1779 served as a prelude to the more famous battle of Kettle Creek, where the soldiers who attacked the fort ambushed a British force of approximately 800 men that had been advancing in their direction, basically ending any British plans to move farther into Georgia.
"The war was going badly up north for the British, so they decided to have a southern campaign and shipped a huge amount of troops down here and started recruiting loyal followers," Dan Elliott, an archaeologist based in Georgia, who found the fort along with a team from the non-profit research group, the LAMAR Institute said. "Kettle Creek was probably the best victory that the Georgians ever had in the Revolutionary War.
"Most battles were failures like the capture of Savannah," he said.
Carr's Fort was a small outpost that was located approximately halfway between Athens and Augusta. It was built for American settlers to defend themselves from advancing British soldiers and hostile Native Americans.
The fort would have held 300 or more people in an area no larger than a tennis court, according to Robert Scott Davis, a history professor at Wallace State Community College in Alabama.
"Most of the forts on the frontier were small community affairs," Davis said. "Everybody in the militia company took refuge inside the fort when the community was in danger because either the British were coming or the Indians were coming."
The fighting at Carr's Fort was likely between family members who found themselves on opposing sides of the war, according to David Crass, the director of Georgia's state Historic Preservation Division.
"Here, the clashes were often small in scale and often were as much about settling scores between families or ethnic groups as they were about independence," Crass said. "Carr's Fort is a good representative of one of these smaller battles where many of the combatants likely knew each other."
Elliott and his team began searching the area in January and then returned again in March and April to confirm their findings before announcing them last week. The artifacts are being cleaned and will be turned over to the University of Georgia.
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