Midway Personalities
The Midway Church and Society, founded in 1754, produced an unusually large number of historically significant personalities — Revolutionary War patriots, politicians, scientists, clergymen, and military officers — given its small size. Many of these people are buried in the Church’s beautiful, walled cemetery, and their stories are told at the Midway Museum.
Lyman Hall
Lyman Hall, born in Connecticut in 1724, studied theology and medicine at Yale College, then married and moved to Dorchester, South Carolina, to establish a medical practice. In 1756, he moved his practice to Sunbury, St. John’s Parish, in what is now Liberty County, and became a leading figure in the community. Outstanding in his fervor for the Revolution, Dr. Hall was one of the Georgia delegates to the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. He paid a heavy price for this when the British forces captured Sunbury in 1779, and his plantation and home were burned. After the war, he became Governor of Georgia and championed the founding of the University of Georgia in 1785. Georgia’s Hall county is named after him.
Button Gwinnett
British-born, Button Gwinnett immigrated first to Charlestown, then to Savannah, in the 1760’s, eventually buying St. Catherine’s Island for use as a plantation. He entered politics, and — as a representative for rural farmers and plantation owners — he began a lifelong rivalry with Savannah’s wealthy and powerful politicians, particularly Whig politician Lachlan McIntosh. He was elected in 1775 to attend the Second Continental Congress and in 1776 signed the Declaration of Independence. During the war, he served in the Georgia State Legislature and became Speaker. He became Governor of Georgia, but his rivalry with Lachlan McIntosh escalated to the point of a duel. Gwinnett was shot, and died three days later. Georgia’s Gwinnett County is named after him.
Daniel Stewart
Daniel Stewart, the child of emigrants from Dorchester, South Carolina, to Midway District, enlisted in the Georgia general militia at age 15 in 1776, the same year his father died. He fought for two years in an effort by American forces to drive the British from East Florida, and also fought in defense of Charleston, South Carolina. He was captured and escaped from a prison ship in Charleston harbor. Following the war, he established a plantation named Cedar Hill Plantation in Midway. He was extremely active in military and public life, and was promoted to brigadier general in the Georgia Militia in 1809. He is buried in the Midway Church cemetery, where the U.S. Congress built a monument to him. Fort Stewart, Georgia, and Georgia’s Stewart County are named after him. One of his granddaughters, Martha Bulloch, was the mother of President Theodore Roosevelt.
James Screven
James Screven (1750-1778) had a plantation called “Screven’s Hill,” near the Midway Church and Lyman Hall’s plantation. He was a representative from St. Johns Parish to the 1775 Provincial Congress in Savannah, and was commissioned as a captain in the St. Johns Rangers in 1776. A Brigadier-General in the Georgia Militia during the Revolutionary War, he was wounded during a skirmish with the British forces near the Midway Church in November 1778, and died shortly thereafter. A large monument to General Screven and General Stewart was dedicated in the Midway Cemetery in 1915. Screven County, Georgia, is named after him.
John LeConte
Born and raised in a highly educated and scientifically-minded Midway family, John LeConte was an eminent scientist. After a distinguished academic career in Georgia, John (1818-1891) became the first professor of the newly opened University of California, in Berkeley, in 1869 and later served as university president from 1876-1881. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1878. His brother Joseph (1823-1901) also was a professor at the University of California, and authored nine books in geology and natural sciences. He was a charter member of the Sierra Club and died while camping in Yosemite National Park.
Rev. I.S.K. Axson
Born in 1813, Rev. Dr. I.S.K. Axson was “one of the most beloved pastors at Midway” for 17 years and later served as pastor of the old Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah, where he is buried. His granddaughter, Ellen Louise Axson, met Woodrow Wilson in 1883 in Rome, Georgia, where her father, also a Presbyterian minister, was serving as pastor. They married in 1885, in a ceremony performed by her grandfather, and moved to Princeton, where Wilson took up a teaching position. Mrs. Wilson was First Lady for less than two years, dying of Bright’s disease in 1914.
Charles C. Jones
Rev. Charles Colcock Jones (1804-1863) was a complex personality. Born into a wealthy, slaveowning Midway planter family, he studied theology at Phillips Academy, Andover Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. While studying in the north, he wrestled with the concept of slavery, and with the morality of owning slaves himself, as his family did own many. He eventually decided that, rather than disavow his upbringing and his inheritance, he would devote his life to evangelization of the enslaved people of Liberty County. He wrote a book on the subject – The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States – and worked closely with Liberty County plantation owners to persuade them to allow him to preach to their slaves. He and his family were prolific letter-writers, and their correspondence was published in a mammoth collection in 1972: “The Children of Pride, by Robert Manson Myers.” In 2005, Dr. Erskine Clarke published the award-winning “The Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic,” also based on Jones’ letters, a highly readable and nuanced look at both Jones’ life and the life of his slaves. Both books are available in the Midway Museum gift shop.
Susie King Taylor
Susie Baker was born a slave at Swiss immigrant Valentine Grest’s plantation on the Isle of Wight, Liberty County, Georgia, on August 6, 1848. As a young girl, she was allowed to go live in Savannah with her grandmother, who sent her to an illegal school so she could learn to read, as it was against the law for slaves to learn to read. She had to move back to the plantation shortly before the Civil War, but when Union troops took Fort Pulaski, she fled with family members to Union-held territory, ending up at St. Simons Island where she was offered a position running a school by the Union troops, thus becoming the first black teacher of a freely operating freedmen’s school in Georgia. While there, she married Edward King, a black noncommissioned officer in the 33rd United States Colored Troops. She followed his unit during the rest of the war, serving as a nurse and laundress. In 1902, remarried to Russell Taylor and living in Boston, she published a book, “Reminiscences of My Life in Camp,” about her experiences during the Civil War, the only African American woman in the nation to do so. In 2018, she was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement.