[1] Part of the Altamaha River Delta, the island is located 1 mi (1.6 km) south-southeast of Darien, Georgia.

[3] Butler was the third son of an Irish baronet and an officer in the British Army,[4] who came to the Thirteen Colonies to quell a 1768 uprising in Boston.

[5] Following his wife's 1790 death, Major Butler sold off the last of their South Carolina holdings and invested in Georgia Sea Island plantations.

[7] He conducted a slave census in 1803, listing 540 enslaved people by name and rating each by their ability to labor—a "quarter," "half," "three-quarters," or "full" hand.

After a visit to Butler's Island, Sir Charles Lyell wrote: "The negro houses were neat and whitewashed, all floored with wood, each with an apartment called the hall, two sleeping rooms, and a loft for the children."

[9]: 137 Five months after his burning of the White House in the War of 1812, British Admiral George Cockburn sailed into the Altamaha River Sound, in January 1815.

[8]: 501  Cultivation of rice required more strenuous work than cotton, and the Butler Island workforce was younger and stronger.

Because of the threat of malaria, pregnant women, many children, older workers, and the infirm were housed at Hampton, which was considered healthier.

[6]: 152 At the time of his February 15, 1822 death in Philadelphia, Major Butler held 638 enslaved Africans on the Georgia plantations.

[12] Rice was grown in sunken, flooded fields, and required complex freshwater management to maximize the yield.

The stalks were cut away, and the cured rice boiled in vats, dried, and threshed to separate the kernels from the chaff.

The kernels then were pounded using wooden mortar and pestles to loosen the hulls, the hard outer coating of each grain.

The pounded kernels then were carried in tightly-woven baskets up a ladder into the winnowing barn, a small building atop tall stilts.

The pounded kernels were scattered out through a trap door in the floor, for the wind to blow away the hulls as the heavier brown rice fell into a pan on the ground.

[6]: 114  This was to be powered by the tidal movements of the river but building a solid foundation in the spongy soil proved difficult and having to wait until hours when the tides were moving limited the mill's efficiency.

The number of hands employed in this threshing mill is very considerable, and the whole establishment, comprising the fires, and boilers, and machinery of a powerful steam engine, are all under Negro superintendence and direction.

John A. Butler named his brother Pierce and his fellow First City trooper Dr. Thomas C. James as executors and trustees of his estate.

[16]: 293  The trust would be dissolved, and his estate settled only after Elizabeth married and produced a son who lived to his majority and legally changed his surname to "Butler.

[10]: 316  In August 1853, Pierce and the John A. Butler estate jointly bought the adjacent 700-acre (283-hectare) plantation on General's Island.

[10]: 317  The never-married Eliza also left a bequest to Pierce Butler, which enabled him to buy out most of his brother's share in the plantations.

[13]: xxxix, n.7  With the addition of the General's Island plantation, the mill's output increased to two million pounds per year in the mid-1850s.

[17]: 682 The largest sale of human chattels that has been made in Star-Spangled America for several years, took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, at the Race-course near the City of Savannah, Georgia.

The lot consisted of four hundred and thirty-six men, women, children and infants, being half of the negro stock remaining on the old Major Butler plantations which fell to one of the two heirs to that estate.

Losses in the great crash of 1857-8, and other exigencies of business, have compelled the latter gentleman to realize on his Southern investments, that he may satisfy his pressing creditors.

[18]Pierce Butler squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000 but was saved from bankruptcy by selling half of the 919 Africans enslaved on the plantations.

"[9]: 147 Mortimer Thomson, a reporter for the New York Tribune, traveled to Savannah and posed as a bidder, questioning the enslaved people and attending both days of the auction.

The sale erased most of Pierce Butler's debts but still left him owing about $127,000, including $59,925 to his late brother's estate.

Sarah Butler (1835-1908) married Dr. Owen Jones Wister of Philadelphia in 1859 and kept a diary during the early years of the war.

[24]: 127  She converted an existing Butler Island building into a school, infirmary, and church and hired a black graduate of a Pennsylvania seminary as instructor/minister.

[26] Frances Butler Leigh donated Darien town lots inherited from her father, and its congregants constructed St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, which was dedicated in 1876.