The Civil War: Local People

In April 1864, Julia Johnson Fisher wrote of severe wartime shortages, with meals of rice, skim milk, corn meal, and field peas, animals suffering, and money available but almost nothing to buy. She recorded that Confederates burned Mr. German’s house and mill at King’s Ferry to keep lumber from going to Union forces, while family and pickets struggled to survive on scant food. Moses Dallas, an enslaved man from St. Marys who worked for the Confederate Navy, served as riverboat pilot of the ironclad CSS Savannah. On June 3, 1864, he piloted 120 men in seven boats through the sound near Savannah to ambush the Federal side-wheel gunboat USS Water Witch, but after its capture the vessel was run aground and eventually burned because no qualified pilot could take it away and to prevent its recapture by the Union.

Yulee, Florida · United States