Disappearing historic landmarks preserved for posterity... Tabby houses—slave cabins—doorways and cemeteries that recall the history of the early settlers. A story of the living past. Visible evidence of coastal culture. The Military Era and the Plantation Era—its story and heroes... Oglethorpe—the soldiers of Bloody Marsh—faithful Neptune... Along the arc of the Georgia coast there is a chain of sea islands. Of these, Ossabaw, Saint Catherine’s, Sapelo, Saint Simons, Sea Island, Jekyll, and Cumberland are best known as the Golden Isles. Early Days of Coastal Georgia, which was first published in 1955, presents some of their history, illustrated with vintage photos. Beautifully illustrated throughout with photographs by Orrin Sage Wightman.
An essay collection exploring the history of 5,000-year relationship between human culture and nature on the Georgia coast. One of the unique features of the Georgia coast today is its thorough conservation. At first glance, it seems to be a place where nature reigns. But another distinctive feature of the coast is its deep and diverse human history. Indeed, few places that seem so natural hide so much human history. In Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture, editors Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly have brought together work from leading historians as well as environmental writers and activists that explores how nature and culture have coexisted and interacted across five millennia of human history along the Georgia coast, as well as how those interactions have shaped the coast as we know it today. The essays in this volume examine how successive communities of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, British imperialists and settlers, planters, enslaved Africans, lumbermen, pulp and paper industrialists, vacationing northerners, Gullah-Geechee, nature writers, environmental activists, and many others developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced well-defined coastal landscapes. Together these histories suggest that contemporary efforts to preserve and protect the Georgia coast must be as respectful of the rich and multifaceted history of the coast as they are of natural landscapes, many of them restored, that now define so much of the region. Contributors: William Boyd, S. Max Edelson, Edda L. Fields-Black, Christopher J. Manganiello, Tiya Miles, Janisse Ray, Mart A. Stewart, Drew A. Swanson, David Hurst Thomas, and Albert G. Way.
Georgia's past has diverged from the nation's and given the state and its people a distinctive culture and character. Some of the best, and the worst, aspects of American and Southern history can be found in the story of what is arguably the most important state in the South. Yet just as clearly Georgia has not always followed the road traveled by the rest of the nation and the region. Explaining the common and divergent paths that make us who we are is one reason the Georgia Historical Society has collaborated with Buddy Sullivan and Arcadia Publishing to produce Georgia: A State History, the first full-length history of the state produced in nearly a generation. Sullivan's lively account draws upon the vast archival and photographic collections of the Georgia Historical Society to trace the development of Georgia's politics, economy, and society and relates the stories of the people, both great and small, who shaped our destiny. This book opens a window on our rich and sometimes tragic past and reveals to all of us the fascinating complexity of what it means to be a Georgian. The Georgia Historical Society was founded in 1839 and is headquartered in Savannah. The Society tells the story of Georgia by preserving records and artifacts, by publishing and encouraging research and scholarship, and by implementing educational and outreach programs. This book is the latest in a long line of distinguished publications produced by the Society that promote a better understanding of Georgia history and the people who make it.
Capturing the history and beauty of a key destination in the land of the Golden Isles... Eighty miles south of Savannah lies St. Simons Island, one of the most beloved seaside destinations in Georgia and home to some twenty thousand year-round residents. In Island Time, Jingle Davis and Benjamin Galland offer a fascinating history and stunning visual celebration of this coastal community. Prehistoric people established some of North America's first permanent settlements on St. Simons, leaving three giant shell rings as evidence of their occupation. People from other diverse cultures also left their mark: Mocama and Guale Indians, Spanish friars, pirates and privateers, British soldiers and settlers, German religious refugees, and aristocratic antebellum planters. Enslaved Africans and their descendants forged the unique Gullah Geechee culture that survives today. Davis provides a comprehensive history of St. Simons, connecting its stories to broader historical moments. Timbers for Old Ironsides were hewn from St. Simons's live oaks during the Revolutionary War. Aaron Burr fled to St. Simons after killing Alexander Hamilton. Susie Baker King Taylor became the first black person to teach openly in a freedmen's school during her stay on the island. Rachel Carson spent time on St. Simons, which she wrote about in The Edge of the Sea. The island became a popular tourist destination in the 1800s, with visitors arriving on ferries until a causeway opened in 1924. Davis describes the challenges faced by the community with modern growth and explains how St. Simons has retained the unique charm and strong sense of community that it is known for today. Featuring more than two hundred contemporary photographs, historical images, and maps, Island Time is an essential book for people interested in the Georgia coast. A Friends Fund publication.
This engaging and curiosity-rousing book blends scientific fact with a timely conservation message and anecdotes of a family's encounters with nature. It is an invitingly readable guided tour of the flora, fauna, and landscape of the distinctive Georgia coast.
Have you ever wondered what left behind those prints and tracks on the seashore, or what made those marks or dug those holes in the dunes? Life Traces of the Georgia Coast is an up-close look at these traces of life and the animals and plants that made them. It tells about how the tracemakers lived and how they interacted with their environments. This is a book about ichnology (the study of such traces) and a wonderful way to learn about the behavior of organisms, living and long extinct. Life Traces presents an overview of the traces left by modern animals and plants in this biologically rich region; shows how life traces relate to the environments, natural history, and behaviors of their tracemakers; and applies that knowledge toward a better understanding of the fossilized traces that ancient life left in the geologic record. Augmented by illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically grounded book that will serve as source both for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast.
Sapelo, a state-protected barrier island off the Georgia coast, is one of the state’s greatest treasures. Presently owned almost exclusively by the state and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Sapelo features unique nature characteristics that have made it a locus for scientific research and ecological conservation. Beginning in 1949, when then Sapelo owner R. J. Reynolds Jr. founded the Sapelo Island Research Foundation and funded the research of biologist Eugene Odum, UGA’s study of the island’s fragile wetlands helped foster the modern ecology movement. With this book, Buddy Sullivan covers the full range of the island’s history, including Native American inhabitants; Spanish missions; the antebellum plantation of the innovative Thomas Spalding; the African American settlement of the island after the Civil War; Sapelo’s two twentieth-century millionaire owners, Howard E. Coffin and R. J. Reynolds Jr., and the development of the University of Georgia Marine Institute; the state of Georgia acquisition; and the transition of Sapelo’s multiple African American communities into one. Sapelo Island’s history also offers insights into the unique cultural circumstances of the residents of the community of Hog Hammock. Sullivan provides in-depth examination of the important correlation between Sapelo’s culturally significant Geechee communities and the succession of private and state owners of the island. The book’s thematic approach is one of “people and place”: how prevailing environmental conditions influenced the way white and black owners used the land over generations, from agriculture in the past to island management in the present. Enhanced by a large selection of contemporary color photographs of the island as well as a selection of archival images and maps, Sapelo documents a unique island history.
DIVHow did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents? In On the Rim of the Caribbean, Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger story: how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character. Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution./div
