"Most people think nothing ever happened where they are," historian Ann Lee Caldwell told a gathering Saturday.
"But all history is local," she told the crowd of about 50 at Richard B. Russell State Park in Elbert County, Ga. "It all connects. And this small battle in the backcountry became a link in the chain of events that founded America."
Caldwell, a history professor at Augusta State University and a specialist in colonial history, was the keynote speaker at a commemoration of the Feb. 11, 1779, Battle of Vann's Creek. The battle saw a patriot force of about 100 men commanded by South Carolinian Robert Anderson oppose the crossing of the Savannah River by an estimated 800-man force of loyalists from the South Carolina upcountry.
Anderson County and the city of Anderson were later named in Robert Anderson's honor. The battle site of Vann's Creek was officially recognized in 2006, in significant part because of the efforts of Elbert County historian Stuart Lyle.
While technically a victory for the loyalists, the pro-British forces lost about 100 men.
"It had a demoralizing effect on the loyalists," said Ed Rigel, commander of the color guard of the Georgia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. "And it was demoralizing at a crucial time of the war."
The remainder of the pro-British force was virtually destroyed three days later, on Feb. 14, at the Battle of Kettle Creek, south of present day Washington, Ga., by a combined force of Georgia and South Carolina militia under the overall command of Andrew Pickens. The loyalists had been on the move to meet a force of British regular troops in Augusta. The two forces were expected to be able, once linked, to crush any opposition remaining after the December 1778 occupation of Savannah.
According to historians, the two battles together dealt a major blow to British hopes of raising significant loyalist forces to support the actions of British regular forces.
Caldwell cited the view of her late colleague at Augusta State, the noted historian Ed Cashin, in saying, "The inability of the British to hold the Georgia and South Carolina backcountry was a significant to their ending the war."
In her presentation Saturday, Caldwell spoke about a topic she said was often overlooked in history, the role of women in the revolutionary period.
Slotted by society and the times into subservient roles, not even having an separate legal identity from their husbands, the civil war that was the American Revolution in the backcountry compelled many women to take over the roles on the farms normally filled by their husbands.
Women also became an unofficial quartermaster corps, supplying the irregular forces of the backcountry fighting, sometimes providing sanctuary, sometimes spying. Women also formed links in an intelligence network so effective that it led some loyalists operating out of Augusta to attempt banishing all women from the backcountry.
Some even took up arms themselves to defend their homes, Caldwell said, noting Elbert County's own Revolutionary War heroine Nancy Hart.
The site of the Battle of Vann's Creek is now under Lake Russell, but commemorators marked the occasion Saturday by laying wreaths at a ceremony presided over by the color guard of the Georgia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Stuart Lyle said efforts to find out the full story of the battle are ongoing.
"We know the names of only a few of those who fought here, like Anderson, Pickens and others," he said. "But we continue to try to trace down others."
Marking little-known battles such as that at Vann's Creek serves an especially important purpose in today's world, according to George Pittard, vice president general of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, who attended the ceremony Saturday.
"Very little of the period is taught in our schools these days," Pittard said, "little about why the people fought and what they fought for, little about our founding documents. This is why the (Sons of the American Revolution) has taken up the challenge of doing it."
