Guyton's Confederate Past

by Roger Allen

Guyton has not always been a sleepy little burg: during the War Between the States it was a beehive of activity. There was a major Confederate Hospital, which stretched from Central Boulevard to Highway 119 to Lynn Bond Avenue to Pine Street; there was a major Confederate Military Enlistment encampment at Camp Davis, 2 1/2 miles north of town; and there was a series of railroad tracks that led from the port of Savannah to northern Georgia, where the battles raged.

The Confederate Army had four hospitals scattered around the city of Savannah, a small convalescent camp in Springfield and the General Hospital in Guyton. The Guyton Hospital treated wounded soldiers as early as April of 1862 and continued operating until December 1864. By October of 1862, there was 46 medical staff serving under the command of Dr. William S. Lawton, the Surgeon In Charge.

The hospital was essentially a series of wooden buildings arranged over the campus. There were so many patients coming to the hospital from northern Georgia battlefields, that it wasn’t long before patients were being housed at Whitesville Church (now known as Guyton United Methodist Church). One source states that over 1/2 million meals were served to hospital patients. There were at least 35 soldiers who died while being treated at the hospital......Read More

Mega Shopping Center Coming to Port Wentworth

Will have about 1 million square feet of retail space

By Jennifer July Mitchell

Pooler, Port Wentworth and Effingham County residents won’t have to drive into Savannah for a lot of their major shopping needs when a mega-shopping center coming to a 100-acre tract on the southwest corner of Highway 21 and I-95 goes vertical. The shopping center will offer about 1 million square feet of retail and commercial shopping space with a variety of national retailers, possibly including grocery stores, fine dining, fast food restaurants, and “big box” retail, which refers to those retailers with major square footage, like the Target store in the Savannah Mall.

Developer Liberty Wentworth LLC expects to start signing tenants in next three or four months, with the first stores opening in about a year to a year-and-a-half. The City of Port Wentworth has given preliminary site plan approval to the project. As each retailer is signed, they will have to go back to Port Wentworth City Council for specific site plan approval before they can build.

The shopping center will have a lot of competition besides Savannah’s Abercorn Street shopping district. Major shopping centers are already cropping up on Pooler Parkway and at Godley Station, not to mention the shopping center planned for Rice Hope Plantation, a planned community that just broke ground in Port Wentworth about a mile north of the I-95/Highway 21 intersection, and whatever retail goes up in the Effingham Economic Development Authority’s 2,700-acre tract in Effingham County, formerly owned by International Paper...... Read More