Carter, Farish, 1780-1861.

Farish Carter was a planter, land speculator, and entrepreneur of Scottsborough Plantation, near Milledgeville, Baldwin County, Ga., and owner of a plantation at Coosawattee, Murray County, Ga. Carter married Eliza McDonald, sister of Charles J. McDonald (1793-1860), and had five children: Mary Ann (d. 1844), Catherine (d. 1851), James Farish (b. 1821), Samuel McDonald, and Benjamin Franklin (d. 1856).

Farish Carter was born in South Carolina on 24 November 1780, the son of James and Letitia Martin Carter. James Carter was killed by the British during the siege of Augusta in September 1780, two months before his son was born.

Farish Carter attended the academy of the Reverend Hope Hull in Washington, Georgia. He became a merchant in Sandersville and during the War of 1812 served as United States Army contractor for Georgia. With the resulting profits, he bought a plantation at Scottsboro, four miles south of Milledgeville, and another estate, Bonavista, on the Oconee River. By 1845, he owned 33,293 acres and 426 slaves in Baldwin County alone. Rock Spring or Coosawattee, his north Georgia plantation and summer home (in Murray and Gilmer Counties), purchased during the Cherokee removal, encompassed over 15,000 acres and produced a wide range of goods--tobacco, wool, livestock, grains, and other foodstuffs. Carter also controlled a Louisiana sugar plantation for several years, circa 1830-1835.

With many partners and companies, Carter conducted extensive land speculations, shifting westward with the frontier, and including the acquisition of former Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw possessions, and eventually holdings in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Indiana, and Illinois.

Carter invested the income from agricultural and land ventures in a variety of enterprises. He owned interests in grist mills, marble quarries, and a woolen mill in north Georgia; a cigar factory with slave children as laborers; toll bridges and ferries throughout Georgia; and steamboats on the Ocmulgee, Oconee, Altamaha, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers. He held large blocks of stock in Georgia banks and railroads and financed gold mining in north Georgia and North Carolina. His slaves were leased to railroads and to individuals.

Carter tried to develop textile mills to utilize the cotton produced on his plantation, especially during the 1840s when cotton prices were low. He helped to establish a short-lived mill at Tom's Shoal on the Oconee in the 1830s and became part owner of the Coweta Falls Factory (1844), the first textile mill within the city of Columbus. There, in 1845, Carter began constructing another six-story factory, where he planned to use slave labor. However, disputes over water rights, the near failure of Coweta Falls, and rising cotton prices led him to keep his slaves in the field, and the Carter Factory remained empty until the Civil War began and its first owner died.

Farish Carter married Eliza McDonald on 26 April 1811. Mrs. Carter was the sister of Charles J. McDonald (1793-1860), who was governor of Georgia from 1839 to 1843. Eliza McDonald and Farish Carter had five children: Mary Ann (d. 1844), Catherine (d. 1851), James Farish (b. 1821), Samuel McDonald, and Benjamin Franklin (d. 1856). Mary Ann married a Mr. Davis in 1844, and died a few months later. Catherine married a Dr. Furman, had two sons, and died in 1851. Her two sons, John and Farish, were raised for the next six years by her parents, and then returned to live with their father. James married Mary [Powell?] and had one child, Mary. James's first wife apparently died in the early 1850s and he married Bettie [surname unknown] in about 1855. Samuel married Emily Colquitt, daughter of Walter Terry Colquitt (1799-1855), and had several children. Benjamin did not marry and died in 1856.

Farish Carter died on 2 July 1861.

(See John S. Lupold, Farish Carter, Dictionary of Georgia Biography, Kenneth Coleman and Charles Stephen Gurr, ed., vol. 1, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 198?)