Rural Felicity Plantation was a

plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...

, occupying around of land,''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

JSTOR JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...

(1928), p. 170 in Camden County,

Province of Georgia A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outs ...

. Located on the southern banks of the Little Satilla River, it was given by the

State of Georgia Georgia is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina; to the northeast by South Carolina; to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean; to the south by Florida; and to the west by ...

to John Hais Hardee Sr. in 1787 for his distinguished service during the

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

. He was one of the first burials there, upon his death in 1809, aged 61. A family burial ground, which has come to be known as the Hull Cemetery, exists on the property. (Joseph Hull, who lived in nearby Little York, married Sarah Hardee, the sister of physician John Hais Hardee Jr., who was born in 1803.''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

(1928), p. 172 Hull was buried in the cemetery after his death in 1865, four years after his wife.) Lieutenant general

William J. Hardee William Joseph Hardee (October 12, 1815November 6, 1873) was a career United States Army, U.S. Army and Confederate States Army officer. For the U.S. Army, he served in the Second Seminole War and in the Mexican–American War, where he was capt ...

was born at the plantation house in 1815. The 1830 Camden County census indicated that John Hais Hardee Jr. and his sons, Thomas Ellis and Noble Hardee (brothers of William), owned 114 slaves. Upon the death of John Jr. in 1838, another of his sons, George Washington Hardee, took over the running of the plantation until the death of his mother, Sarah, in 1848, after which he moved across the nearby state line to

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

. Charles Seton Henry Hardee, another grandson of John Jr. and Sarah, visited his grandparents at the plantation, where he was born in 1830, several times during his childhood. He documented them in his memoir ''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', which was published by his granddaughter after his death in 1927. His father, John, was buried at the plantation upon his death, aged 32, in 1835.''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

(1928), p. 159 "At the first bend of the stair case, 'in the house where I was born' at Rural Felicity, stood a Grandfathers Clock about six feet high," wrote Hardee.''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

(1928), p. 167 "It was a source of never failing delight to me to watch the measured swing of its long pendulum and listen to its loud ticking, as it marked the rapid flight of time by seconds, minutes and hours." At the rear of the house was a piazza that ran almost the entire width of the house. It looked northward "over an almost boundless continuity of marsh, with the Little Satilla River gleaming brightly in the sunshine in the distance."''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

(1928), p. 168 Rowboats travelling to or from

Brunswick, Georgia Brunswick () is a city in and the county seat of Glynn County in the U.S. state of Georgia. As the primary urban and economic center of the lower southeast portion of Georgia, it is the second-largest urban area on the Georgia coastline after Sa ...

, "about ten miles from Rural Felicity, in a northerly direction, had to cross over the Little Satilla." A 16-year-old Hardee's final visit to the plantation occurred in 1846. His grandmother was living with George Washington Hardee, his uncle, who was "thirty-three years old at the time and unmarried."''Reminiscences of Charles Seton Henry Hardee'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'',

(1928), p. 171

References

{{reflist, 2 Plantations in Georgia (U.S. state) Province of Georgia 1787 establishments in Georgia (U.S. state)