Photography by Wayne Moore
First Presbyterian of Darien
McIntosh | Organized 1809
The First Presbyterian Church of Darien is the oldest of the town’s five historic churches, its origins reaching back nearly three centuries to the founding of the settlement by Scottish Highlanders in 1735. These “warrior farmers,” brought to Georgia by General James Oglethorpe, established Darien as a military outpost to guard against Spanish incursions into the colony. They brought with them their families, their Presbyterian faith, and their own minister, Reverend John McLeod. Though his ministry ended abruptly when he left Georgia in 1741, the Highlanders had firmly planted the seeds of Presbyterianism in coastal Georgia.
+ Continue readingThe formal congregation that became First Presbyterian was not organized until 1809, when Dr. William McWhir, a respected Irish preacher and reported confidant of George Washington, arrived in McIntosh County. He first gathered a small flock at Sapelo Bridge, then permanently relocated to Darien in 1820, establishing the First Presbyterian Church with seventy members. By 1861, just before the Civil War, the congregation had grown to 120 members, over half of whom were Black—making it a thriving bi-racial community of faith.
The war, however, brought devastation. Union naval forces controlled the Altamaha by early 1862, and the congregation dispersed after March of that year. Then, in June 1863, Union troops under Colonel James Montgomery—along with the young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, later immortalized in the film Glory—burned Darien to the ground. The church was lost, and Presbyterian life in Darien lay dormant for over a decade.
Resilience, though, is part of Darien’s character. In 1874, townspeople resolved to rebuild, and by 1876 a new sanctuary rose at the present site. Yet more trials followed: a devastating hurricane in 1898 and a fire in 1899 once again destroyed the church. From this hardship came the striking tabby-concrete sanctuary that still stands today, completed in 1900 at a cost of $4,100.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the First Presbyterian Church of Darien embodies the persistence of faith in a town that has weathered war, fire, and natural disaster. Its story reflects the wider history of Darien itself—Scottish settlement, coastal defense, prosperity, devastation, and renewal. Nearly 300 years after the Highlanders first arrived on the banks of the Altamaha, Presbyterians still gather here to worship in the “village by the sea.”