Guest Post by Denise Weimer

In the early 1770s, most of Georgia’s settlements clustered near the coastline and up the Savannah River. A 1773 land cessation meeting held in Augusta tempted settlers inland, including Elijah Clark, who would become famous during the Revolutionary War as a militia colonel. The family of my heroine, Jenny White, also moved from North Carolina to Middle Georgia soon after. Clark and John Dooly led men like Jenny’s father Asa and Scottish scout Caylan McIntosh in three-month militia terms battling Creek Indians. When British forces captured Savannah in an effort to subdue the south and recruit Loyalists in the backcountry, Georgia militia rallied against the Tories as well.

In early 1779, British Colonel Archibald Campbell unleashed Tory raiders to sweep into Middle Georgia, destroying homesteads, harassing families of Patriots, and conscripting or imprisoning men of military age. James Boyd, an Irishman from South Carolina, was one of these raiders. He carried a commission as a colonel to recruit for the British military. When South Carolina militia commander Colonel Andrew Pickens pursued Boyd into Georgia, Georgia commanders Dooly and Clark joined the hunt. They caught Boyd’s troops at Kettle Creek, eight miles from present-day Washington, on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day, 1779. In a two-to-three hour battle, the Patriots pushed the Loyalists from the area. 

However, things were far from settled for the settlers living in Middle Georgia, the area that soon became known as “the Hornet’s Nest.” 

Map of Kettle Creek

Love blooms between Jenny and Caylan when she nurses him back to health following his Kettle Creek wound, but Caylan soon returns to the militia, leaving Jenny, her mother, and her younger siblings to fight off sickness, starvation, Indians, and Loyalists. Their story only culminates when the major southern coastal cities fall in 1780. Clark gathers six to seven hundred civilians to join his remaining three hundred soldiers on a harrowing exodus, pursued by the British to the Watauga Settlement in North Carolina. Along the way, Jenny counts the costs of the war and fears she might lose everything.

 

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Author Denise Weimer
Denise Weimer holds a journalism degree with a minor in history from Asbury University. A former magazine writer, she is a substantive editor for Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas as well as the author of The Georgia Gold Series, The Restoration Trilogy and a number of romantic novellas. Represented by Hartline Literary Agency, Denise is a wife and swim mom of two daughters who always pauses for old houses, coffee and chocolate!

 
Website: deniseweimerbooks.webs.com

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