Darien is a city in and the county seat of McIntosh County, Georgia, United States. It lies upon Georgia’s coast at the mouth of the Altamaha River, approximately 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Savannah, and is portion of the Brunswick, Georgia Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is the second oldest planned city in Georgia and was originally called New Inverness. The population of Darien was 1,460 at the 2020 census, down from 1,975 in 2010.

The British built Fort King George in 1721, near what would become Darien. At the mature it was the southernmost outpost of the British Empire in North America. The fort was lonesome in 1727 gone attacks from the Spanish. Its remains constitute the oldest fort upon the Georgia coast.

The town of Darien (originally known as “New Inverness”) was founded in January 1736 by Scottish Highlanders recruited by James Oglethorpe to war as settler-soldiers protecting the frontiers of Georgia from the Spanish in Florida, the French in the Alabama basin, and the Indian allies of each colonial enterprise. On January 10, 1736, 177 emigrants, including women and children, arrived on the Prince of Wales to uphold Darien, which was named after the Darien scheme, a former Scottish colony in Panama. Among the initial settlers was Lachlan McGillivray, who became a noted trader considering the Creek people, and Lachlan McIntosh, a leader during the American Revolutionary War.

The Scots originated mainly from on the subject of Inverness and consisted of both Jacobite and Hanoverian supporting clans, the majority of whom spoke and no-one else Gaelic. When visited by Oglethorpe in February, the settlers had already constructed “a battery of four pieces of cannon, built a guardhouse, a storehouse, a chapel, and several huts for particular people.” Darien was laid out in accordance like the now-famous Oglethorpe Plan.