Episode 42: Cumberland Island Salt Marshes and African American History

Photo: U.S. Mint

Cumberland Island, located about 15 miles southeast of Kingsland, is the largest public barrier island off the coast of Georgia. And, Cumberland Island Salt Marshes and African American History is where located throughout the island.  Accessible only by ferry, the Cumberland Island National Seashore (the name given to the area after being acquired by the National Parks Service in 1972). Many groups have occupied the island over its 4000-year history, from the Timucoan tribe that first inhabited the island to the Spanish who built missions there and the British occupied it Spanish Florida

By 1860, over 500 enslaved people lived on the island, outnumbering white inhabitants by a ratio of seven to one.  At its peak, the largest plantation, Stafford Plantation  held 348 subjugated Africans and African Americans working over 4,200 acres of land, spanning one-third of the island. The island had fifteen plantations and small farms involved in its chattel slavery system.

Many enslaved Africans were imported from present-day Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, including people from the Fula, Igbo, Gola, Malinke, Bambara, and Serer tribes who resided on the continent’s Western Coast. They were not randomly chosen as the demand for enslaved African labor with rice-growing expertise increased, over 13,000 Africans arrived from the “Rice Coast” and “Grain Coast” regions, bringing their sophisticated knowledge of rice and grain harvesting in both lowland and upland regions.

This matters enormously: these were not people stripped entirely of knowledge and culture. They arrived as experts and the marshes of Cumberland Island looked, ecologically, very much like home.

Cumberland Island’s enslaved people worked largely on a task system, which meant that they were responsible to complete a certain task rather than work certain hours. This is crucial to understanding daily life on the island’s marshes and fields.

When the assigned task was complete typically around 2 o’clock in the afternoon the enslaved populations had what their enslavers called “free time” to manage their private vegetable and herb gardens behind their cabins, hunt, trap and fish, tend to the sick or infirm, practice private forms of worship, or assist extended family members.

The salt marshes were central to this survival economy. The enslaved Africans typically ate corn and sometimes pork rations provided by the plantation owner but often supplemented their meals with fish, wild animals, oysters, and clams for survival.  The marsh was not just a workplace, it was a pantry, a pharmacy (marsh plants had medicinal uses rooted in West African herbal knowledge), and a space of relative autonomy.

These difficult working conditions sometimes resulted in spinal injuries from rice cultivation, pulmonary illness, rheumatism, foot rot caused by standing in high water levels, and even death.

An archaeological dig near the Dungeness slave quarters has yielded a glimpse into daily life. Along with pieces of iron skillets, glass, clay pipe segments and pottery, bones from small mammals, birds, turtles, frogs and fish were uncovered.  This tells us that people were fishing, hunting, and cooking their own supplemental food, building a domestic life in the margins the system allowed them.

The enslaved Africans on Stafford Plantation lived in eighteen cabin sites, with several chimney ruins still intact today. They routinely used tabby, a durable construction material made from sand, lime, and oyster shells common to the Lowcountry, to construct their chimneys and fireplaces.  Even their building materials came from the marsh.

The isolation of Cumberland Island, the very thing that made it so brutally efficient as a plantation system, paradoxically preserved something extraordinary. The Gullah-Geechee culture that resulted in enslaved communities on Georgia’s coast was a result of the retention of many aspects of African culture and language. The isolated nature of Georgia’s barrier islands also resulted in distinctive slave management practices.

Many traditions of the Gullah and Geechee culture were passed from one generation to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality. The sweetgrass baskets, the ring shout spiritual songs, the creole Gullah language itself, all of it survived because the islands were isolated enough that the people could hold onto it. Since speaking in their native African tongue was typically forbidden, Gullah Geechee allowed enslaved people at least one small act of freedom, communicating with each other, in words and song, in a way which was accepted yet not understood by their masters.

One of the most powerful stories connected to Cumberland Island happened during the War of 1812. In 1815, British troops took over Cumberland Island and all its plantations, offering freedom to the enslaved by joining British forces or boarding British ships as free persons headed for British colonies. Over 1,500 formerly enslaved people who made it to Cumberland Island from across the coastal region sought freedom by boarding British ships to Bermuda, Trinidad, and Halifax in Nova Scotia.

In the 1890s, “The Settlement” was established at the north end of the island as a residential area for Black workers as Georgia passed laws requiring racial segregation of housing and public facilities. The First African Baptist Church, established in The Settlement in 1893, is one of the few remaining structures of this community, and is famously the church where John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married in 1996. Settlement residents made a living in a variety of capacities: as employees for Hotel Cumberland, servants for wealthy island residents, and working for various timber operations.

What happened in those marshes was not just labor, it was the creation of an entire civilization under conditions of profound cruelty. The enslaved people of Cumberland Island built the island’s wealth, fed themselves from its waters, preserved their language and spiritual traditions in the spaces the task system accidentally created, and ultimately chose freedom the moment it was offered. Their descendants built a church that still stands. Their culture, Gullah-Geechee is one of the most distinctive and living African American cultural traditions in the United States.

The marshes of Cumberland Island are not empty. They are full of that history, for anyone who knows how to listen.

Cumberland is nearly uninhabited, with the exception of around 40 islanders, generational landowners with a small number of private residences on the island. These are primarily Carnegie family descendants who retained lifetime estate rights when the island became a National Seashore in 1972. The most visible permanent resident community is centered around Greyfield Inn,  the only hotel on the island, still owned and operated by Carnegie descendants, where a small staff also lives year-round.

Their Gullah-speaking descendants lie buried in a small cemetery at Cumberland’s North End, and a Baptist church built by descendants still stands. So the spiritual presence of the formerly enslaved community endures on the island, even if their living community no longer does.

The National Park Service also maintains a small year-round staff on the island, and the NPS restricts access to 300 people on the island at a time, and campers are allowed to stay no more than seven nights.

This is one of the most haunting and historically significant things on the entire island and most visitors never find it. Today all that remains of the Stafford Plantation is a complex of 26 hearth-and-chimney ruins, which are the most visible remnants of the slave quarters. The chimneys are constructed of tabby and fired red clay bricks, with conditions ranging from complete ruin and rubble to fair, standing structures that are deteriorating and unstable.

All that remains of Stafford’s house is a ruin known as “The Chimneys”  a series of 24 hearth-and-chimney structures representing Stafford’s enslaved people’s housing, about one kilometer east of the main house.

The structures, arranged in two parallel rows in the “Slave Quarter,” were where the enslaved cooked, lived, slept, and ate.  The wood of the actual cabin walls is long gone, rotted or burned, but the tabby and brick chimneys the enslaved people built with their own hands from oyster shells and sand still stand in three parallel rows in the forest, like a row of silent witnesses.

There is also a striking detail in the NPS historical records: two chimneys with their fireplaces facing each other indicate the probable location of the hospital, a common structure found among slave quarters. Even the medical care of enslaved people is readable in the landscape.

The near-destruction of The Chimneys is its own story. At one point, the lessee of the plantation threatened to remove the chimney ruins. The NPS stopped him. There have been no further issues. They were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, and stabilization work began in 2004.

Three ways to learn more about Cumberland’s history:

1. The Chimneys at Stafford Plantation, the slave quarter ruins, standing in the forest. Accessible by hiking or biking from the Sea Camp dock, though remote. Not on the standard day-visitor route — you need to seek it out.

2. First African Baptist Church at The Settlement,  this humble one-room church was established in 1893 by African American residents of the island and their families. Some of the founders were born into slavery and emancipated following the Civil War. The church served as a free place of worship and community center for the North end community. It is 14 miles north of the Sea Camp dock, so the NPS recommends visiting only as part of the Lands & Legacies Tour.

3. The Settlement Cemetery where Gullah-speaking descendants of the enslaved are buried, at the island’s north end. A profoundly moving place.

Website – 
Cumberland Island National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service)
www.nps.gov

Cumberland Tours & ferry information