Santa Isabel de Utinahica (ca. 1610-ca. 1640) was a 17th-century Spanish mission believed by the Fernbank Museum of Natural History to be located in modern-day Telfair County, Georgia, near Jacksonville. It served the Utinahica tribe, who lived in the area. The small mission was a part of a series of missions set up in what was then the northern reaches of the Spanish colony of Spanish Florida, similar to the Spanish Missions in California or Mexico.
Operating for approximately two decades in the early 17th century, the mission was a religious outpost consisting of one Catholic friar sent out to convert and monitor the native people at the edges of the colony. The name Utinahica was taken from the local Native American chiefdom, themselves a part of the Timucua people and possibly ancestors of the current Creek people.
The mission's exact location is not presently known with certainty. In April 2006 the Fernbank Museum of Natural History and Georgia Department of Natural Resources began three summer seasons of archeological excavation where the Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers converge to form the Altamaha River. No evidence of the mission was found, and only Muskogean (proto-Creek) architecture and artifacts were uncovered, plus some trade items of probable Spanish origin. In the 17th century the Spanish referred to the Altamaha River as the Rio de Santa Isabel, after the short-lived mission.
At the time that the Fernbank Museum began its extensive search for the mission at the modern-day Forks of the Altamaha, the museum was warned repeatedly by Creek Indian scholars and also, historians, who specialized in Colonial Georgia history, that its archaeologists were looking at the wrong location. The Spanish were not allowed by the ancestors of the Creek Indians to penetrate up the Altamaha River. When a faction of the Tama-tli (Muskogean) people of the region converted to Catholicism in the early 17th century, they were expelled. The Catholic Tama-tli established a mission near present day Valdosta, GA. They eventually moved to Louisiana, where they live to this day in association with Apalachee refugees.
During the Colonial Era, "Forks of the Altamaha" referred to the confluence of the Ohoopee River with the Altamaha River, about 50 miles from the Altamaha's outlet near Darien, GA. All Spanish, English and French colonial archives consistently showed the region where the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers join to form the Altamaha River to be continuously occupied by Muskogean peoples, until the early 19th century. The confluence of the Oconee and the Ocmulgee River became known as the "Forks of the Altamaha" in the early 19th century. However, some descendants of the Creek Indians, whose ancestors managed to hide out in the swamps along the river, still live in the region.
Spanish colonial archives and maps describe a straight rode being constructed along the northwestern edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, which terminated at the original Forks of the Altamaha - at the confluence of the Ohoopee and Altamaha Rivers. Along this road, small missions were established, that had short livlihoods, due to their proximity to hostile Muskogeans (proto-Creeks.) It is quite possible that Mission of Santa Isabel de Utinahica was located at the terminus of this road. Since the mission was so primitive in construction, and short-lived in existence, there is little little liklihood of any ruins being visible at the surface of the terrain today.