Ebenezer Creek Paddle

I am trying to do this on my ipad and have missed some photos and formatting....  But I am traveling with only the ipad, no laptop, so I am a little limited...  

Yesterday, six of us set out to explore Ebenezer Creek, a pristine waterway west of Savannah, known for its bald cypress with huge trunks at their base.  It was a perfect day for paddling, clear skies, highs in the upper 70s.  We put in at Tommy Long Landing and paddled a little over 3 miles down to the Savannah River where we stopped for lunch just downstream of the confluence.  This was a site of an Salzberger community that settled this area in the 1730s.  The Salzbergers were Lutherans from Southern Germany and in the early 18th Century given a choice to convert back to Catholicism, to die or to flee.  They chose the latter and signed up with Oglethorpe who was trying desperately to populate his new colony of Georgia.  Seeing an opportunity at hand, Oglethorpe decided to place the Germans as a buffer between Savannah and the Creek Indians.  There is still an active church in the community, which they say is the oldest building in use in Georgia.  

The steeple is topped with a swan, which has a bullet hole which supposedly came from a Union soldier setting his sights on his gun during the Civil War.  The swam came from a reference to John Hus, an early Reformer from Prague, who supposedly said as he was being burned at the stake for heresy in the 15th Century that he would return as a swan.  Many Lutheran followers saw Luther as the swan who had come back to reform the church.

This is the site of the Old Savannah Road, where a tragedy (or an atrocity) occured in the Civil War.  One of the Union flanks was heading toward Savannah and being hindered by a large following of freed slaves.  The commanding General Jefferson Davis, who ironically shared the name with the Southern President, ordered his soldiers to quickly cross the bridge and then to take it up so that they could be freed by the large group of freed slaves.  Behind Davis' troops was a Confederate calvary who, when approaching, the slaves panicked and jumped into the water.  No one knows just how many drowned.  Accounts range from a dozen or so, to hundreds, to even a  thousand.  

The Savannah River is pretty muddy after all the rain

We had lunch along the banks of the Savannah River and then, thanks to one of our numbers being a Lutheran pastor, we were met by his colleague at the old church for a tour.  In the afternoon, we paddled back to our vehicles for a drive back through Savannah during traffic. 

I'm heading up to North Carolina for the weekend.  Tonight I will attend a football game for my high school and tomorrow I'll be at a class reunion--my first in 3 decades!  What do you have as plans for the weekend?