John Dooly - Bigger Investments

Bigger Investments

John Dooly's own time to take a public leadership role came later and further west, in Georgia. In January 1772, after the peace and security of the new courts brought about a rise in property values on the South Carolina frontier, he mortgaged 2,050 acres (8.3 km2) of his lands to Charles Pinckney of Charleston. With his new capital, Dooly could finance a major investment. Four months later, as a resident of South Carolina, he petitioned to secure land across the Savannah River in St. Paul Parish near Augusta on the colonial Georgia frontier. He also obtained a commission as a Georgia deputy surveyor and had by then acquired seven slaves.(n15) Dooly shortly afterwards abandoned these beginnings for another prospect. George Galphin and other Georgia and South Carolina traders had tried to compel the Cherokee Indians to trade a large tract of land to pay for the growing debts allegedly owed to them. In 1773, Georgia royal governor James Wright preempted this plan and persuaded the Creek and Cherokee nations to give up what he named the Ceded Lands, some 1,500,000 acres (6,100 km2) that would greatly expand the northwest border of St. Paul Parish. The Indians received a cancellation of their debts, which Wright planned to pay by selling the new lands, a plan that benefited the British government by almost simultaneously ending all of the free headright grants in America. The additional territory, in theory, would significantly add to Georgia's colonial population and militia numbers by being limited exclusively to persons like the Doolys from other colonies. Ceded Lands sales also paid for a company of rangers who would serve as a form of civil protection from bandits that settlers from the pre-Regulator days of South Carolina could particularly appreciate.(n16)

In this new Ceded Lands, Dooly built a cabin on Fishing Creek, which he later abandoned before claiming 500 acres (2.0 km2) that included an island and the 200 acres (0.81 km2) of "Lee's Old Place," also called Leesburg, at the mouth of Soap Creek on the Savannah River. In 1759, Thomas Lee of South Carolina had obtained a warrant of survey to this land on the indeterminate edge of what was then the Georgia Indian frontier, but he had never obtained a formal grant. Dooly, like most of his neighbors, borrowed money from prominent Lt. Thomas Waters of the rangers to make the initial payment on his acquisition, which he named "Egypt." He also obtained loans from Savannah merchants to pay for further improvements, and he may have raised still more funds by selling three slaves.(n17) Dooly thus set out to create a plantation similar to the much larger venture begun by his new neighbor on the Savannah River, wealthy Englishman Thomas Waters. The latter had been a resident of Georgia and South Carolina since at least 1760, when he had worked for a previous company of rangers as quartermaster.(n18)