By Ligaya Figueras
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Darien—Situated at the mouth of the Altamaha River, surrounded by the winding salt marshes of McIntosh County, is the city of Darien.
History buffs may know Darien as Georgia’s second-oldest city, founded in 1736, just three years after Savannah. But centuries before it became a British holding, this area of coastal plains was inhabited by the Guale Indian tribe.
Over time, it felt the footprints of 16th and 17th-century Spanish missionaries, British soldiers, and Scottish Highlanders. It was the forced home of enslaved people, a target of Union soldiers, and the home of bankers and timber barons who made Darien one the world’s leading exporters of pine timber until the early 1920s….