Note: The following is part of a series of columns exploring the use of rivers in the early history of Georgia and Bulloch County. When the Marquis de LaFayette, a true Revolutionary War hero, came to visit Georgia, he sailed to Augusta on the steamboat Altamaha. In 1817, brothers Samuel and Charles Howard acquired the charter for the Steamboat Company of Georgia, in which the state gave them a 20-year monopoly on river boat traffic on the Savannah River.