The new colony, Georgia, was a utopian experiment to a certain extent, based on an idealized concept of agrarian equality and with the motto "not for ourselves but for others," nom sibi sed allis. While other colonies had been established with large land grants to gentry, this last of the 13 colonies was more egalitarian, at least at its inception. Families were each given a town lot around one of the four initial squares, a garden plot and a fifty-acre farm plot. Slavery, strong drink though not beer, lawyers, and Catholics were all banned from the colony's founding though the prohibitions all fell by the wayside within a few years. The colony was intended to give poor, hardworking protestant families a chance in the New World and to provide a buffer between Carolina and the Spanish presence at Saint Augustine in Florida.

The new colony's seal featured a mulberry leaf and silk worm.

Illustrations courtesy Georgia Historical Society

Georgia was a commercial as well as a social experiment. The colony's economy was to be based on the production of a number of commodities with great expectations placed on revenues from the production of silk and wine. Many mulberry trees were planted in the new colony. The Trustees established a garden to determine the viability of other crops in the warm, wet climate. It was the climate, in fact, that crushed hopes of silk production. However, rice, forest products and eventually cotton, gave the port of Savannah a brisk trade during colonial years. Illustration at left from literature promoting the new colony shows employment in silk production.