Timber Boom

Darien immediately began rebuilding after the war. The first thing to be revived in the town was the timber business. The sawmills were restored at Lower Bluff and Cathead. Timber began to be rafted down the river from the upcountry as early as 1866, and ships from afar began calling at Darien to load timber and sawn lumber. By 1868, the local timber brokers were reporting the shipment of 20 million board feet of yellow pine timber and lumber in one year from Darien bound for U.S. and overseas ports.

During the timber "boom era", which lasted from 1866 to about 1914, the sawmills at Darien, Doboy, Union Island, Hird Island and Mayhall Island turned out huge volumes of sawn lumber from the rafts that poured down the river from the interior.

The Railroads and Timber

In February 1890, the Darien Short Line Railroad began limited operations in McIntosh County. The line, plagued by financial and political troubles almost from its inception in 1885, was envisioned as a means of shuttling timber to Belleville and the Sapelo Sound loading grounds from two directions: from the vast Hilton & Dodge timber land holdings in western McIntosh, Liberty and Tattnall counties, as well as from the busy sawmills of Darien.

The Short Line was the forerunner of full-fledged rail service in McIntosh County. It was in January 1895, when the laying of track was finally completed from Belleville to Darien, where the line terminated at the depot on Columbus Square. By this time the Darien Short Line had become the Darien & Western, and it gave the town its first rail connection with the interior. Up to that time, Darien had been totally dependent on water transportation; there had been no access to the south at all except by water - the bridges across the Altamaha delta would not be a reality until 1914.

In 1906, the Darien & Western merged with two other area lines to form the Georgia Coast & Piedmont Railroad. The G.C. & P Railroad Company began construction of trestle-work across the Altamaha delta marshes in 1912.

In 1914, the work, which included high-level steel bridges over the South Altamaha and Darien rivers, was complete and Darien, for the first time, was linked by rail to Brunswick and other points south.

When the Georgia Coast & Piedmont went bankrupt in 1919, a group purchased the bridges and trestlework and constructed a highway, completed in 1921, to connect Brunswick and Darien.