The population also increased very rapidly. The rich lands were purchased and settled on by farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas. The colony that had been planted by Oglethorpe had never ventured very far from the seacoast. A few probably followed the course of the Savannah River, and made their homes in that region; but the people brought over by Oglethorpe were not of the stuff that pioneers are made of. The experience they had undergone in the mother country had tamed them to such a degree that they had no desire to brave the future in the wilderness. Adventures of that kind were left for the hardy North Carolinians and Virginians who first settled what was then known as Upper Georgia. After the Revolution, this tide of immigration increased very rapidly, and it was still further swelled by the profits that the Whitney gin enabled the planters of Georgia to make out of their cotton crops. The settling of Georgia began with the charitable scheme of Oglethorpe. The making of Georgia began when the North Carolinians and Virginians began to open up the Broad River region to the north of Augusta. It was due to the desperate stand taken by these hardy pioneers that Georgia continued the struggle for American independence. To Upper Georgia came some of the best families from Virginia and North Carolina,--the Grattons, the Lewises, the Clarkes, the Strothers, the Crawfords, the Reeses, the Harrises, the Andrewses, the Taliaferros (pronounced Tollivers), the Campbells, the Barnetts, the Toombses, the Doolys, and many other families whose names have figured in the history of the country. Here also settled James Jack, the sturdy patriot who volunteered to carry the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence to Philadelphia. The Congress then in session chose to shut its eyes to that declaration, but it was the basis and framework of the Declaration afterwards written by Thomas Jefferson.