John McIntosh Kell was born at Laurel Grove in Darien to John and Margery Spalding Baillie Kell. At age 16, he observed the U.S. Brig Consot on survey of the Georgia coast and decided to serve in the Navy.

Kell was appointed midshipman at the age of 17 in the United States Navy on Sept. 9, 1841. He would serve in the Mexican War, was a member of the expedition of Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in 1853 and Master of the flagship Mississippi on the homeward cruise.

Upon Georgia's secession from the United States, Kell was the first U.S. Naval officer to offer his service to the Confederate States of America. He would eventually serve as Executive Officer of the CSS Sumter; then the CSS Alabama throughout her brilliant career on the seas to her final battle with the USS Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France.

In his memoirs, “Recollections of a Naval Life,” Kell conveys the disastrous events when theCSS Alabama sunk beneath the water in such a vivid manner: “When Admiral Semmes and I jumped into the water, the ship was rapidly sinking. After swimming off a few yards, I turned to see her go down. As the gallant vessel, the most beautiful I ever beheld, plunged down to her grave, I had it on my tongue to call to the men who were struggling in the water to give three cheers for her, but the dead that were floating around me and the deep sadness I felt at parting with the noble ship that had been my home so long deterred me. In all the two years of the Alabama's career, I was off the ship but twenty-two hours. Down she went -- she had never had a home within the country she so gallantly served. She had been christened on the broad seas, and now she met her death and burial upon the same bosom that had quivered at the sound of the cheers uttered when she was named. A fitting end. No foe men ever trod her deck as victor."

Kell’s assignment once he was able to return to the Confederate States was to protect the James River, thus allowing him to serve in both the blue and brown water navy. After the war, he served as Adjutant General of Georgia from 1887 until his death in 1900. His portrait hangs prominently in the Georgia State Capitol.

John McIntosh Kell’s life was riddled with more adventure than the average person will ever experience, but he was still an officer and a gentleman, a son and a father, a husband and a friend. In closing his memoirs, Kell states this about his love for the sea: “I think being born almost within sound of the billows and in sight of the ‘deep blue sea,’ I had an innate love for it which grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength, and which will remain with me while life lasts.”

Kell died in 1900 and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Griffin, Georgia.

John Kell