Oh, Sapelo!

Sunset over salt marsh. Sapelo Island, Georgia

On a recent four-day weekend provided by my children’s public school calendar, we made plans to travel to Sapelo Island, Georgia.  While we do enjoy taking our kids to the beach and theme parks, we also prioritize roads less traveled and history we can touch.  We loaded up the kids, the grandparents, and strapped both a car-top carrier and trailer hitch carrier to our SUV.  The six of us piled in for the five hour drive to Darien, Georgia where we would catch the first Friday ferry to Sapelo.

Sapelo Island is Georgia’s fourth largest barrier island.  It is inhabited by roughly fifty people, most of whom identify culturally as Saltwater Geechee.  Many Sapelo residents can trace their ancestry to West African people formerly enslaved on the island.  There are no hotels, restaurants, or much in the way of commercialization on Sapelo, and there is only one community:  Hog Hammock.  To visit, one must make arrangements with a resident for overnight lodging and to get added to the ferry manifest.  Visitors must either bring any food they may need with them or hire a local resident to cook evening meals.  Sapelo is also a natural wonderland.  While about 450 acres make up Hog Hammock, the island’s other 16,000 acres are wilderness and protected by the state of Georgia.

Fifty residents?  Eleven miles of Atlantic coastline?  Hundreds of years of history which survives in a cultural bubble and thousands of acres of estuaries and marshland untouched by human development?  We had to go.

I contacted a Sapelo homeowner to make plans for our visit.  He offered us the use of vehicle along with his home, referred us to a local tour guide, and put me in contact with a local woman who could cook our evening meals.  To prepare for the trip, we watched Sapelo-centric programs on Georgia Public Broadcasting, and I downloaded podcasts about Sapelo for the drive.

What is so special about Sapelo Island?  To answer that, one has to understand what is so special about the Georgia coast.  It’s largely uninhabited and almost entirely undeveloped.  Coastal Georgia is only slightly more than 100 miles in length, but its 500,000 acres of marshland comprise over one-third of the salt marsh on the entire East Coast.

The way the Georgia coast exists today can be traced directly back to the Civil War.  Prior to the war, most of Georgia’s coast were plantations cultivating timber, rice, sugar cane, or cotton.  In January of 1865, and following his ‘march to the sea,’ General William T. Sherman signed Special Field Order No. 15 which established Black settlements on coastal lands.  The first section reads as follows:

 “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”

What many do not know, is that these reparations comprised of coastal land (including all of Georgia’s) were negotiated in Savannah between General Sherman, Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton, and a group of twenty Black Baptist and Methodist ministers.  When asked what would be best for the emancipated Black populace, the spokesperson for the group, 67-year-old Baptist minister Garrison Frazier replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.  I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over … ”

This act left much of the Georgia tidewater region to people who had been formerly enslaved on the islands.  Between 1865 and 1912, over 400 formerly enslaved people returned to and settled in one of thirteen communities on Sapelo Island.  Following the assassination of President Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson (a Southern sympathizer) reversed Special Field Order No. 15 less than a year after Sherman had signed it.

In the reconstruction period, plantation owners abandoned or lost much of their returned property because of financial hardship and lack of ability and desire to perform the agricultural labor necessary to make a living in a harsh coastal environment.  What is hard about marshy coastal environments?  Bugs.  Yellow fever.  Malaria.  This was before screens on windows and air conditioning.  Land was sold:  either to Freedmen who were willing to work it, or to northern industrialists looking for winter vacation homes.

Family names like Carnegie, Reynolds, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Ford eventually purchased much of the Georgia coastline and kept huge tracts of land intact including seven of Georgia’s thirteen barrier islands.  When the estates of these families were administered in the 1960s and 70s, the private land was often deeded for public preservation.  Today, most of Georgia’s coastline is owned and managed by the state or federal government as parks, preserves, and wildlife sanctuaries.

With the exception of the residential community of Hog Hammock, 97% of Sapelo Island is owned and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources having been sold to the state by the fourth wife and widow of tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds.  While Reynolds is criticized for consolidating Black land ownership from thirteen settlements into the single community of Hog Hammock in an attempt at crafting the island into personal hunting grounds, his legacy can also be credited with establishing a base for the environmental and climate research that is still being conducted on Sapelo today at the University of Georgia’s Marine Research Laboratory.

On Friday morning, we took the 8:30am ferry from Darien to Sapelo.  Darien is home to the Georgia shrimp boat fleet, and the 1863 “burning of Darien” is featured in the Civil War movie, Glory.  We pulled our vehicle right up to the dock, and we shuttled our cooler, tubs of dry food, and overstuffed backpacks aboard.  An employee from the Georgia DNR checked our names off a list, and we paid the $5 (cash only!) for the roundtrip fare.  A school bus quickly pulled into the spot vacated after my husband went to park.

McIntosh County school bus at the Sapelo Island ferry dock

The boat ride across Doboy Sound took about thirty minutes, and dolphins raced in our wake.  Upon docking at Sapelo, our local host met us with keys to a twenty-year-old Suburban and instructed us to follow him.  The vehicle had over 250,000 miles on it, no rear shocks to speak of, and a check engine light that stayed on all the time, but it worked great for our family of six.  We were left at our home for the next three nights with a map of the island where the northern end was marked “NO GO” in red sharpie, and instructions to “leave it like we got it” with the keys in it at the ferry dock after our departure.

Shortly after our arriving at our cottage, our tour guide knocked on the door.  She drove the loaner Suburban, and we were able to acclimate ourselves with the island as she shared with us what it was like being born and raised in a place like Sapelo.  Much of the tour involved historical places:  the Reynolds mansion, a two-hundred year old lighthouse, a cemetery dating from the 1870s, and two of the three churches on the island, but she also pointed out native plants and species of wildlife.

Sapelo Island Lighthouse, constructed 1820; renovated 1998

We got a kick out of the Hog Hammock sign stating a population of 70 people (which our guide quickly informed us the current number is 53) and announcing it as the “Home of Allen Bailey of the Kansas City Chiefs.”  We are originally from Kansas, and my parents still live there.  My husband literally cried when the Chiefs won the Superbowl in 2020, so along with being a reminder of how small the world really is, this made the trip additionally exciting.  When dinner arrived on our first evening, the young man delivering it was wearing a Kansas City Chiefs training camp t-shirt.  We had a lengthy conversation and figured out that our meals for the next three days were being prepared by the sister of a former Kansas City Chief and being delivered by his nephew.  Fried chicken, pork ribs, and fresh shrimp and fish…the bounty of the island and the talents of our local chef did not disappoint.

We saw sunrises over the ocean.  We saw a rare Georgia sunset over water where tidal creeks and marshlands stretched to the horizon.  We saw island whitetail deer running through a wildlife preserve and more birds than we could count.  We identified seashells and birdcalls, and my father was permanently accessorized by binoculars.  We found out why the north end of the map was labeled “NO GO” for a two-wheel drive Suburban.  We saw the stark juxtaposition between the island as a former hub of agrarian life, a gilded-age playground for the wealthy, and the spartan and subsistence lifestyle evidenced in the enclave of Hog Hammock.

Hog Hammock window and screen

Hog Hammock is what remains from the “40 acres and a mule” lesson promulgated by history textbooks long on idioms and short on context, and the population of the island is shrinking.  Living on an island is a hard life for older people, and there aren’t jobs for younger people.  Land is often transferred as “heirs’ property” which means the land has no clear title.  It passes to heirs after the original owner’s death but without a directive from a will or a bequeathment to a specific individual.  In large families over many generations, there can be dozens of heirs for a single plot of land.  In Hog Hammock, for every neat and tidy bungalow, there are several homes in disrepair.  Tragedy of the commons is visible:  heirs can’t agree on what to do with the property, but they also know selling to outsiders would bring development and a tax burden too high for residents that choose to remain, so the homesites lay fallow.  Sapelo gentrification is a conundrum:  resources that would attract a population enabling  the island to thrive, would also spoil what is so special and unique about it.  As the last Saltwater Geechee community, the culture is concentrated and distilled.  Dilution is not the solution when its this rare.

One thing that I thought was curious in visiting with the several people that we met, was that there seemed to be a sort of reverence to the Reynolds legacy.  Although Reynold’s land acquisition practices were at best suspect and at worst exploitative, vestiges of Reynold’s ownership manifest as state employment opportunities on the island and thousands of acres of protected nature that Sapelo is known for.

Tabby ruins

After exploring the island on our own one afternoon, we discovered some tabby ruins along the marsh.  Tabby is a historical coastal construction practice which mixes burned and crushed oyster shells with lime to make a cement-like building product.  Barns, homes, outbuildings can all be made from it.  I have seen buildings used as dwellings for enslaved people made from it, and the Reynolds mansion on Sapelo is made from it too.  When made, tabby walls would have been covered with a thin stucco-like layer hiding the oyster shells underneath, but in historical ruins, the outer layer is usually deteriorated, and the internal oyster shells are often exposed.  The ruins weren’t marked on any of the maps we had been given, so I asked a local woman about them in conversation.  She replied, “Oh, those were just houses.”

“Houses?” I asked.

“Yes, there were plantations all over this island.  Those are just old houses.”

Old houses.  I had assumed they were houses for enslaved people.  But she said “just old houses.”

It dawned on me we were talking about the same thing.  I expected her to use reference language that, to her, was unnecessary.  It was the best reminder:  humanity first.  I’ve toured all over the country.  Even plantations that acknowledge their past honestly, refer to buildings that housed enslaved people in ways that mention slavery.  The ruins I was curious about were remnants of houses.  Slavery wasn’t mentioned in that conversation because it didn’t have to be; the whole island is the way it is because of slavery.

Sand dollars from Nannygoat Beach, Sapelo Island, Georgia

While my children’s classmates were at Universal Studios or crammed on spring break beaches and in ski condos, we were walking on the empty beaches of Sapelo getting rich in sand dollars and education that can’t come from books.  Sapelo is known for two things:  Saltwater Geechee people and vast pristine ecological habitats, but the theme of property is woven into both.  The island would not be the natural resource that it is today were it not for a man with a desire to consolidate land into a vast hunting retreat, and he wouldn’t have been able to do that were it not for the Civil War, which was fought over the enslavement and ownership of the ancestors of people that still live in Hog Hammock.

Were it not for slavery, which beget the war,  Sapelo Island—and the rest of the Georgia’s coastal estuaries, marshlands and tidal regions—would be developed.  An uncomfortable, complicated truth.  I have a love affair with the abundance of nature on this island, but I’m torn by questions:  How do I reconcile the beauty of a sunset over marsh or the trill of native birds in a land that only exists because human beings considered other human beings property?  What, in the course of human history, would have had to have happened differently for this land to look like any other coastal beach resort community which would have fallen inside the geography of Special Field Order No. 15, a Hilton Head or Amelia Island?

I am not sure I want to know.

To the people of Sapelo Island who hospitably shared a little bit of their world with my family:  we were humbled and so grateful to be there.