Thomas Spalding
Thomas Spalding would later in life name his Darien, Georgia mansion after his ancestral Scottish home.
Spalding's father was an Indian trader, planter, and held a number of political posts prior to the American Revolution.
Spalding's father was a Loyalist during the American Revolution and moved the family to East Florida when the war broke out.
Shortly after his term ended, Spalding, his wife, his mother, and his friend Joseph Bryan traveled for 18 months in England, Scotland, and France.
In 1804, Spalding ran for one of Georgia's four at-large seats for the 9th United States Congress as a Democratic-Republican candidate alongside his friend Joseph Bryan.
Georgia Governor John Milledge issued a certificate of election to Mead, who was seated in March 1805.
While in Congress, Spalding was made chairman of a committee to investigate the boundary dispute between Georgia and North Carolina.
[4] In 1815, he served as a commissioner from the United States of America to Bermuda to negotiate compensation related to property taken or destroyed in the South by the British in the War of 1812.
By the time of his death in 1851, Spalding and his family owned all of Sapelo Island with the exception of 650 acres at Raccoon bluff.
He was noted for being one of the largest producers of Sea Island Cotton in the state and wrote extensively on its cultivation and its history.
Due to Spalding's advocacy, sugarcane cultivation soon spread to many other plantations in coastal Georgia and inland along the banks of the Altamaha River.
He gave thousands of mulberry tree saplings away to new neighbors between 1837 and 1838 in order to increase silk cultivation.
[14] Spalding also cultivated olive trees on Sapelo Island that he had imported from the Province of Livorno in Italy, but had limited success.
[15] In 1803 a group of 75 captive Igbo people, that had been procured for Spalding and a neighboring planter John Couper, rebelled against being forced into slavery.
Twelve of them committed mass suicide by drowning at what would come to be called Igbo Landing on St. Simons Island.
He believed that type of community organization would better acclimate to slavery the newly enslaved people he purchased at Charleston, South Carolina, who were just arriving from Africa.
During the War of 1812, Spalding placed Bilali in charge of training other slaves with muskets to aid in the defense of Sapelo Island in the event of a British invasion.
This required Spalding, Thomas Mann Randolph, and a team of men to travel from Ellicott's Mound at the headwaters of the St. Marys River in the Okefenokee Swamp through the frontier of South Georgia and onwards to Tallahassee, Florida.
Construction of the railroad began on the banks of the Ocmulgee River in the 1830s at Mobley's Bluff in modern Ben Hill County, Georgia.
He died in 1851, while en route home, at the residence of his son near Darien, Georgia, named Ashantilly.
