Button Gwinnett | Lyman Hall | George Walton
Button Gwinnett |
First off, watch this video. Button Gwinnett is the guy from Georgia if you're looking for the famous dead. He did lot of good for Georgia, which would have made him popular in history, but his real fame lies in his signature. The fact that he signed so few documents makes it so that his "John Hancock" is more valuable than John Hancock's actual "John Hancock." We joke that all Gwinnett left behind was the Declaration of Independence and a few I.O.U.'s, but when you do the research, you find that the joke is not really a joke at all. Besides the Declaration, there are only 50 other accounts of his signature throughout history. Because of this, a man who otherwise would have fallen into a historical semi-obscurity outside of the realm of Georgians and hardcore Revolutionary War historians, now has a signature worth around $800,000. The podcast Radiolab does a really good segment (starts at 8:35) on Button Gwinnett, among other buttons. We here in Georgia love Button Gwinnett, because he is our epic duelster, CEO of the state military (back in the days before the union), valiant invader of the British-Florida. Okay, maybe only history nerds know all that, but he is well known, at least in name, because of his namesake, Gwinnett county: a suburban district of greater Atlanta. I live in and grew up in the county just adjacent to Gwinnett county.
Despite many strong loyalist tendencies in Georgia at the time, Gwinnett and the other founders voted for independence, even after inattendance of the first continental congress. [Hey, if I lived over 700 miles away from a city where a bunch of grown men just wanted to sit and complain all day about problems that mostly didn't affect me, in the age of horses and cholera, I might not have gone either.\ But he went and they went and the rest is history. Now we move on to the juicy stuff. Gwinnett was killed in a duel in May of 1777. Tensions with his political rival Lachlan McIntosh (who is also buried in Colonial Park, and happened to be a favoured underling of George Washington) had grown more and more heated, eventually reaching a peak as each blamed the other for the failed invasion of Florida. McIntosh called Gwinnett a scoundrel and a lying rascal. A tour guide once told me that the graveyard itself served as the dueling grounds, but in reality the confrontation took place on the Royal Governor's property, a few miles south of Savannah in an area know today as Thunderbolt. Though both were wounded, the twelve paces and three days' passing proved fatal only for the young Gwinnett. Despite the immediacy and boldness of his death, his final resting place is wrapped in mystery. There is very little documentation suggesting where his body was buried; local newspapers at the time said he was to be buried in what is now Colonial Park cemetery in Savannah, and the cenotaph there states that he rests below. However, in the 1840s, a monument to the Georgia signers was commissioned to be placed in Augusta, and then men themselves to be re-interred there. Lyman Hall and George Walton are there to this day, but Gwinnett was never moved, never mentioned, and never found. Suspicious. In the 1950s, a man went searching for Button Gwinnett, finding only a badly broken tombstone which had remains of faded and cracked numbers that may have corresponded to the Gwinnett lifetime. They got permission to dig up the man beneath: a five foot six body with a colonially dated ballistic wound to the femur. Was it Button? One expert said yes. Another said no. The city of Savannah decided to kill the mystery and announce that it was in fact he that was buried in Colonial Park cemetery, dedicating the cenotaph (or tombstone?) you see pictured. |
The memorial lies near the center of this relatively small graveyard. It is the largest structure at the site. The four pillared Roman-style temple houses a faded and browned placard, the infamous signature brazenly embossed in the bottom left corner of the epitaph.
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Lyman Hall & George Walton |
These two get the same introduction because they are located in the same place, at that epicenter of that one party in Augusta that Button Gwinett wasn't invited to. Okay that's not true. But like mentioned above, since they couldn't affirm that the grave in Savannah was Button Gwinett's for sure, they only reinterred the two of them here in Augusta. I wasn't quite sure where to find Hall and Walton, other than the direction of 'outside some courthouse in Augusta.' So I ended up driving around on one of the first warm days of the late Winter (though in reality its Spring in Georgia anytime after the second week of January,) in hopes that I would find the pillar of memorial by traveling to each location on my GPS that said "courthouse" in Augusta. The name for the actual location is the Augusta-Richmond Count Municipal building, if you ever want to see it for yourself.
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"Gwinnett was an Englishman: Hall was a native of Connecticut: and Walton was born a Virginian. Georgia, however, proudly claims them as her adopted sons, and... by this memorial testifies, in enduring form, her grateful appreciation of their services in the cause of her freedom."
-Charles Jones Jr. (1886)