Georgia Historical Society

Site Visits 

View of the marsh near Sapelo. Photo by Charlie Snyder

The Rural Experience

The workshop's first landmark is Sapelo Island, a 16,500-acre island located midway on the Georgia coastline on the eastern fringe of McIntosh County.  The story of African-American life and culture on the island begins in the early nineteenth century and encompasses slavery and plantation economies, the establishment of freedmen communities, and endures with the presence of a small, close-knit community of African Americans who trace their lineage to enslaved West Africans.  The plantations of Sapelo Island were the largest producers of Sea Island cotton in antebellum America and the island offers a wonderful opportunity to explore the ways in which geography, environment, and economies shaped the development of African-American culture in the nineteenth century.  This particular landmark affords a glimpse into the rich cultural history and communities of African Americans in Georgia's barrier islands.  Buddy Sullivan, the Director of the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve and an expert on coastal Georgia history, will provide an overview of the history of the island.  In addition, participants will visit Hog Hammock, an historic African-American community established in 1857 and visit with Sapelo Island native Cornelia Walker Bailey, a direct descendent of Bilalie, the most famous and powerful enslaved African to inhabit the island.  Ms. Bailey is author of the cultural memoir God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, and has been deemed the keeper of the islands culture and history and the sage of Sapelo.  This island, like Ossabaw Island, will help contextualize the larger African-American experience in the Atlantic world, the organic nature of African-American folkways and culture, and how both have been sustained into the twentieth century and beyond. 

Example of Haint Blue paint on Ossabaw Island. Photo by Charlie Snyder

Ossabaw Island, six miles from Savannah's coastline, is the workshop's second landmark.  The island possesses something rare: a peerless archeological site, well-preserved plantation records, the founding of a traditional African-American community on the coast, the connections of a barrier island with an urban center like Savannah, and illuminates the role of Northerners in shaping the coast of Georgia.  Accessible only by a special pre-arranged ferry, the 26,000-acre island of salt marsh and maritime forest is a Heritage Preserve cared for by the Ossabaw Island Foundation.  In 1995, Ossabaw was listed on the National Trust's 11 Most Endangered List and in 1996 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.  The island is an excellent place to study the ways in which coastal Georgia was part of the cultural and economic exchange of the larger Atlantic world.  Ossabaw tells an important story about the African-American population of this region and its unique culture; some 205 African Americans (Census of 1860) lived on the barrier island and developed a culture that drew deeply on their African roots.   The landmark focal point revolves around three tabby slave cabins on the north end of the island, described by the state archaeologist as "one of Georgia's most significant archaeological and historical sites." The complex includes the cabins constructed during the 1840s, an associated yard and field system, and rich archaeological deposits relating to African-American life dating to the pre-Revolutionary era. The tabbies have kept their original appearance and yet were lived in as late as the 1980s. The cabins offer the opportunity to tell three different stories - that of the enslaved workers of the colonial and antebellum periods, the freedmen of the second half of the nineteenth century and their struggle to carve out an existence for themselves in Reconstruction America, and the African Americans of the twentieth century who lived on the island or in small communities on the mainland and came over to work.  Giving this story particular impetus is the fact that several families who live in Pin Point, Georgia (birthplace of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas), five miles away by water, are descended from those who were on the island in the late nineteenth centuries.  The site visit to Ossabaw Island will include a tour of the archaeological site and a co-lecture by Dr. Paul Pressly, Director of the Ossabaw Island Educational Alliance, and Emory Campbell of the Penn Center, the preeminent institution for the study of Gullah culture.

Telfair's Owens-Thomas House

The Urban Experience

The Telfair Museum's Owens-Thomas House and corresponding urban slavery tour will serve as the workshop's third landmark.  Originally built for cotton merchant Richard Richardson between 1816 and 1819, the interpretive house museum includes one of the earliest, intact slave quarters in the South and offers a more inclusive view of nineteenth-century life for the entire household, including African Americans.  As the starting point for the program on the urban experience of African-Americans in Savannah, this house displays not only the workmanship of African-American laborers, but provides an example of what living conditions would have been like for urban domestic workers in the nineteenth century.  Led by Vaughnette Goode-Walker, Director of Cultural Diversity and Access for the Telfair Museums, a guided walking tour of the neighborhood will provide participants with insights into the lives of the people associated with the house.   The tour will focus primarily on the life of Andrew C. Marshall, who purchased his freedom from the Richardson family and became the minister of a local black congregation. As both an enslaved worker for the Richardsons and as a free man, Marshall belonged to a world far different from that experienced by African Americans living in rural settings.  Workshop participants will have the opportunity to see the homes, churches, and other structures that would have been integral to the lives of Marshall and his neighbors - both free and enslaved.  

Beach Institute

The workshop's fourth landmark, the Beach Institute, will allow continued discussion of the importance of education within the African-American community, particularly in the post-Civil War period.  The Beach Institute was established in 1867 by the Freedmen's Bureau using funds from the American Missionary Association to provide quality education for blacks in Savannah.  Following emancipation, African Americans throughout the South sought educational opportunities they had previously been denied.  The establishment of these schools provided the chance for northern philanthropists like Alfred A. Beach, editor of Scientific American, to become involved in the effort to educate former slaves.  Beach provided the funds to purchase the site of the Savannah school that would bear his name.  Until 1919, Beach Institute served the educational needs of the African-American community as a school and continues today as a center for cultural education on African-American art and history.  Workshop participants will experience the Beach Institute both as a historical site through a tour of the building and discussion of its history as well as through a walking tour of the Beach Institute neighborhood.