It was the 1790s, and Brunswick was still shaking off The Revolution. The town had been laid out in 1771 with royal names, tidy streets, and green squares that looked more British than American. Then the war came. Many of Brunswick’s early Tory lot holders fled, leaving their lands to be confiscated and regranted after independence.
By 1789, the young United States had named Brunswick an official port of entry, and by 1797 it would become the seat of Glynn County. The quiet peninsula where Benjamin Hart and his wife Nancy Morgan Hart arrived was not yet the grand port city of later years. It was raw, unsettled, and still being remade. This probably suited Nancy just fine.
Before Brunswick, the Harts lived in Georgia’s Broad River country, where the Revolutionary War was less a distant political struggle than a brutal neighborhood conflict between Patriots and Loyalists. Nancy’s name would become one of the fiercest to emerge from that backcountry world. Modern historians warn that her most famous exploits belong more to legend than documented fact, but what a legend it is.
Artist Felix Darley
Nancy Hart, A Heroine of the Revolution, 1853
As the story goes, a band of Loyalists once arrived at Nancy’s cabin, demanding food and forcing her to cook her last turkey. While the men drank, Nancy quietly sent her daughter to summon help, then began slipping their muskets through a gap in the cabin wall. When the men caught on, she grabbed one of the guns herself and held them off. Because Nancy was said to be cross-eyed, each man supposedly believed she had the barrel trained directly on him. In the bloodier 1848 version of the tale, two were shot and the rest were later hanged.
Brunswick's Wright Square monument
Independence Day flowers adorn the monument to early settlers and patriots at the early burial ground at Wright Square
By the time Nancy reached Brunswick, that fiery frontier chapter was behind her, but the Hart family left real traces here. Tax records place Benjamin Hart in Glynn County by 1794, owning fifty acres and fifteen enslaved people. Local tradition and marker accounts place the Hart property near present-day Wright Square, where Benjamin was believed to be buried after his death. In 1929, three of Nancy’s great-great-granddaughters traveled from Kentucky to Brunswick to see where she had lived and where Benjamin was thought to rest.
It’s a little amazing, but also fitting for modern quirky Brunswick that before Nancy Hart hardened into folklore, and before Georgia turned her into a Revolutionary heroine, she passed through Old Town. For one quiet season of her life, one of the state’s fiercest patriot legends belonged to us.
Josh Dukes is a local historian and digital photo restoration artist. He is co-author of the book Brunswick: Past & Present, available at local retailers and online at joshdukesofficial.com.
