Savannah Town, South Carolina is a defunct settlement that was located in the colonial years on the Savannah River below the Fall Line in present-day Aiken County. In the 1670s the Westo had a village here, but they were displaced by the Savannah (as the English called a local Shawnee band) in a trade war, and it became known by 1685 as Savannah Town. The English colony had traders who did a lucrative business in dressed skins with the Savannah Shawnee. Fortified as a frontier post, the settlement developed and ferry service was established across the river. The town was gradually overtaken by its competitor of Augusta, Georgia, established in 1735 five miles upriver and closer to Indian settlements. Traders here intercepted commerce, sending it to their port of Savannah on the coast. By 1740 Savannah Town was declining, and by 1765 the village was abandoned and the fort closed.
Nearby Silver Bluff was the site in 1773–1775 of the first separate black congregation organized in the current United States; most were slaves.[1] During the American Revolutionary War, when the British occupied Savannah, Georgia, most of the congregation members migrated to the city to gain freedom as promised by the British. Some were evacuated with the British in the last days of the war.