Aftermath of the War

The state capitol was reestablished at Savannah, Georgia, in early August 1783. Governor John Martin convened the state legislature. Courts of justice were established. Commis­sioners were appointed to deal with property confiscated by the state from Tories.

 

The people of Liberty County, for the most part, were scattered to the four winds during the Revolutionary War. Their fields were wastelands after years of lying idle. Their homes and slave quarters had been burned by the British. Their only house of worship, by now generally referred to as Midway Church, had been destroyed by the British. Some of the church officials, however, remained at home during the war and now provided a community leadership during the transition from war to peace.

 

Sunbury was not destroyed during the war, but all of its buildings were in bad need of rehabilitation. Some of its former residents came home and started the work. Lyman Hall and his family returned to Liberty County, found Halls Knoll completely destroyed, resided first at Sunbury, then at Savannah, Georgia, and finally in Burke County, Georgia, where he died in 1790.

 

Plantation owners and soldiers started returning home and rebuilding homes, plantations, and farms. Fortune hunters from other states flocked to the county seeking to acquire land by any means legal or illegal. For several years after the war there was confusion in Liberty County about the ownership of certain tracts of land.

 

The Sunbury people sought to implement a resolution passed by the Continental Congress on September 20, 1781, to erect a monument to Brigadier General James Screven at Sunbury. Their efforts came to nothing.

 

Simon Munro, a British sympathizer, was banished from Liberty County at the end of the war. He was allowed to return to his Briar Bay Plantation after repeated petitions to state officials by his relatives and friends. Munro died in 1790 at the age of 40. He and his wife and two of their chil­dren are buried in a family cemetery in what became the Briar Bay community.