DESCRIPTION: This manuscript private letter to the Proprietors of the City of Brunswick, Georgia signed by D. L. Martin and Charles L. Muir, belongs to the final stage of the long and troubled effort to complete the Brunswick Canal in Georgia. It was written at a moment when the work was nearly finished but paralyzed for lack of money. The six-page document pleads with northern and local investors to cooperate, arguing that the city’s real-estate holdings and the canal’s success were inseparable. Without the canal, Brunswick’s fine harbor and well-laid streets remained idle capital; with it, the authors promised, the town would spring to life and the stock of both companies would rise to par.
The letter fits precisely with newspaper reports from 1852 describing a new bond issue for the Brunswick Canal and Rail Road Company. Those public notices named D. Randolph Martin, president of the Ocean Bank of New York, as trustee for $100,000 in second-mortgage seven-percent bonds. In the private appeal, “D. L. Martin” is almost certainly the same man, acting both as financial organizer and trustee. His participation through Ocean Bank linked the Georgia enterprise to New York capital markets, where southern infrastructure bonds were commonly sold under northern trusteeship to reassure investors.
Technically, the canal was a modest work—about nine miles long, four feet deep, and fifty feet wide—but its promoters claimed it would open four thousand miles of interior river navigation, connecting the Altamaha system to the Atlantic at Brunswick. They argued that it would unleash trade in timber, cotton, and naval stores, and they projected annual revenues of up to seventy-five thousand dollars. The letter describes contracts already arranged with Dr. Robert Collins of Macon to finish the remaining excavation at thirty cents per cubic yard, estimating that thirty-five thousand dollars would complete the job.
In the broader context, the letter marks one of the last organized attempts to complete the antebellum Brunswick Canal before the project faded into insolvency. It ties together every thread found in later documentation—the Ocean Bank trusteeship, D. Randolph Martin’s role as fiduciary, and the continuing pattern of Georgia infrastructure financed through northern capital. The document stands as a vivid example of how local ambition, speculative land companies, and Wall Street banking combined in the mid-nineteenth century to promote internal improvements along the southern seaboard.
PUBLICATION DATE: 1852
GEOGRAPHIC AREA: United States
BODY OF WATER: Brunswick Canal
CONDITION: Very Good.
Good.
COLORING:
ENGRAVER:
SIZE:
" x
"
ITEM PHYSICAL LOCATION: 41
PRICE: $3200
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