Hog Hammock, located on Georgia's Sapelo Island, is only accessible by ferry or private boat. It is one of the last island-based Gullah-Geechee communities in America--a living connection to West African languages, folkways, and spiritual traditions. With its dirt roads and tin-roofed houses, Hog Hammock is the site of a social hall, two historic Baptist churches, and a former schoolhouse, all built by descendants of slaves. The nearby Behavior Cemetery has burial sites that date back 200 years. Much has been written about the people of Hog Hammock and Sapelo Island, mostly documenting their lives as slaves and then as landowning free people working for millionaires who reshaped Sapelo Island into their own personal retreats. But there is another part of the island's story, one filled with entrepreneurs, skilled craftsmen, and community leaders, that is told here in Images of America: Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock.

"In this memoir, Sapelo Island native Cornelia Walker Bailey tells the history of her threatened Georgia homeland." "Off the coast of Georgia, a small close-knit community of African Americans traces their lineage to enslaved West Africans. Living on a barrier island in almost total isolation the people of Sapelo have been able to do what most others could not: They have preserved many of the folkways of their forebears in West Africa, believing in "signs and spirits and all kinds of magic."" "Cornelia Walker Bailey, a direct descendant of Bilali, the most famous and powerful enslaved African to inhabit the island, is the keeper of cultural secrets and the sage of Sapelo. In words that are poetic and straight to the point, she tells the story of Sapelo - including the Geechee belief in the equal power of God, "Dr. Buzzard" (voodoo), and the "Bolito Man" (luck)." "But her tale is not without peril, for the old folkways are quickly slipping away. The elders are dying, the young must leave the island to go to school and to find work, and the community's ability to live on the land is in jeopardy. The State of Georgia owns nine-tenths of the land and the pressure on the inhabitants is ever-increasing." "Cornelia Walker Bailey is determined to save the community, but time will tell whether the people of Sapelo will be able to retain the land, and the treasured culture which their forebears bestowed upon them more than two hundred years ago."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history—and enters into the current-day lives—of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian.

The barrier islands of the south Atlantic coastline have for years held a deep attraction for all who have come into contact with them. Few, however, can compare with the mystique of Sapelo Island, Georgia. This unique semitropical paradise evokes a time long forgotten, when antebellum cotton plantations dominated her landscape, all worked by hundreds of black slaves, the descendants of whom have lived in quiet solitude on the island for generations. For more than 50 years of the twentieth century, two millionaires held sway on Sapelo, and it is their story, interwoven with that of the island's residents, that unfolds within the pages of this book. Almost 200 photographs provide testimony to the dynamic forces and energies implanted upon Sapelo by two men, Howard E. Coffin, a Detroit automotive pioneer, and Richard J. Reynolds Jr., heir to a huge North Carolina tobacco fortune. Beginning with a photographic essay about Sapelo's antebellum plantation owner, Thomas Spalding, Sapelo Island moves into the primary focus of the story, the years from 1912 to 1964, an era of grandeur that has left a rich photographic legacy.

In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, over 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life. Demonstrating the resilience of African American families, she includes interviews from the living descendants of slaves sold on the auction block, showing how the memories of slavery have shaped people's lives today. Using the auction as the focal point, The Weeping Time is a compelling and nuanced narrative of one of the most pivotal eras in American history, and how its legacy persists today.