The area that would become the town of Sunbury was first settled by Europeans in 1752 by the families of Benjamin and Samuel Baker, from the British Province of South Carolina.

[1] The site was on the south bank of the Midway River,[note 1] in what was at the time the Province of Georgia,[1] on a bluff several miles upriver from St. Catherine's Sound.

[2] In 1757, 500 acres (200 ha) of this area was conveyed by King George II of Great Britain to Mark Carr, a wealthy military officer.

[3] In 1761,[note 3] the town became Georgia's second port of entry and quickly rose in prominence,[6] soon rivalling Savannah in terms of economic importance.

[1][3] Discussing the town in a 1763 letter to Lord Halifax, James Wright, the governor of Georgia, wrote the following:[9] I judged it necessary for his Majesty's service that Sunbury, a well settled place having an exceedingly good harbor and inlet from the sea, should be made a port of entry; and have appointed Thomas Carr collector and John Martin naval officer for the same.

There are considerable merchant stores for supplying the town and the planters in the neighborhood with all kind of necessary goods; and around it, for about 15 miles, is one of the best settled parts of the country.The town had a shipyard, a manufacturing center that produced shingles and staves, and a causeway connecting it to nearby Colonels Island, which served as an important center for Indigo dye production in the region before the market crashed in 1808.

[9] However, this never came to fruition,[9] and instead planters further inland created a plan to bridge the Newport River near its source in order to directly transport their rice yields to Savannah.

[3] Many planters who owned plantations in the area had houses in Sunbury in which they lived during the summer and fall seasons,[3][9] typically arriving in June and leaving in November.

[12] In 1773, the naturalist William Bartram wrote about a visit he had to the town, describing it as "beautifully situated on the main" with a "capacious and safe" harbor that had "water enough for ships of great burthen".

[9] The road connected Sunbury to Greensboro, Georgia, and was the longest vehicular route established in the state following the Revolutionary War.

[12] During the War of 1812, British warships were stationed off of the coast of Georgia, which disrupted trade and hurt the economies of port cities such as Sunbury.

[20] To combat this, the United States Navy launched a naval expedition to Sunbury, with the plan to use the port's deep harbor as a staging area for gunboats that would patrol the Intracoastal Waterway.

[21] By the end of the war in 1815, the town, like several other coastal settlements in the state, had suffered a significant economic decline due to the blockade.

[3] What remained of the town was ultimately destroyed in 1864 during the American Civil War as part of Sherman's March to the Sea,[1][3] arriving in the area that December.