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Educating, preserving, and revitalizing African American heritage and culture.
52 Weeks of Stories, People, Facts, and Events Celebrating Our African American Heritage Roots and Community from Freedom through Civil Rights
In 1924 Historic Harrington Graded School was built by African American tradesman for the education of their children and grandchildren. Today, 100 years later, this one-room schoolhouse on St. Simons Island, GA is still a place of learning and a community cultural center where residents, schoolchildren, and visitors can learn about Gullah Geechee heritage. As part of the 100 th anniversary of the Harrington School we will publish once a week on our website a short paragraph about a person, fact, or event that enriches our knowledge of coastal African American history. The stories will follow twelve monthly themes:
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JANUARYFOOD
Recipes, Cooks, Farms, Restaurants, Seafood, Hunting, Fishing
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FEBRUARYCOMMUNITY and NEIGHBORHOOD
Families Social, Churches, Sororities, Fraternities, Mutual Aid Societies
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MARCHSPORTS
Risley HS Sports, Recreation, Selden Park, Informal Games, Schoolyard
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APRILCULTURE
Defender Newspapers, Gullah Geechee, Fashion, Writings
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MAYMILITARY SERVICE
All branches, FLETC, Police, Law Enforcement, Airport
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JUNEMUSIC
Juke joints, Chitlin Circuit, Sea Island Festival, Bands, American Folklife
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JULYCIVIL RIGHTS
Segregation, Voting Rights, NAACP, Black Wall Street
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AUGUSTPRESERVING AFRICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE
Buildings, Family History, Cemeteries, Organizations, Success, Challenges
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SEPTEMBEREDUCATION
Schools, Teachers, Lessons Taught at Home
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OCTOBERJOBS & ECONOMICS
Freedman Bank, Factory, Sawmills, Stevedores. Landscape, Housekeeping, Law, Medical, Tradesmen, Seamstresses, Construction, Segregated Businesses
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NOVEMBERSTORYTELLING
Symposium, Folk Tales, StoryCorps, Thanksgiving Oral Histories
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DECEMBERCONNECTIONS
Northern Migration, Ports, Foodways, Gullah Geechee language, Tourism, Railroads, Come back
Some of the stories will be familiar. Others we hope will talk about unsung heroes, forgotten events in history, or facts you feel should be remembered and shared when celebrating our African American roots and community.
Thank you for helping us make sure these stories have their place in history. Do you have memories to add? Please share with us. We welcome your additions to these 52 weeks. Patty Deveau (Email) and Allison Dupuis (Email)
Additional special events and programs will be held throughout the year. To learn more, sign up for email announcements at harringtonschool@ssiheritagecoalition.org, or call 912-634-0330.
Week 41 – Economics and Jobs – Timber
“Pay me, Oh pay me
Pay me my money down
Pay me or go to jail
Pay me my money down
You owe me, pay me
Pay me my money down
Pay me or go to jail
Pay me my money down
Wish’t I was Mr. Foster’s son
Pay me my money down
I’d set on the bank an’ see the work done
Pay me my money down
After the Civil War the longleaf pine forest products industry became the largest sector of Georgia’s industrial economy and the largest employer of African Americans along the coast. Workers cut timber in the coastal interior and raftsmen floated the logs to the sawmills at Darien or St. Simons Island. Skilled box cutters slashed pines, then turpentine dippers dipped the gum which was distilled into rosin and turpentine or naval products tar and pitch. On the docks the stevedores loaded the naval products and lumber that literally became the structural framework of the northern industrial age — from office buildings, factories, residential buildings and even the Brooklyn Bridge and cross ties for the Panama Canal.
Stevedores and Mills
In 1866 a correspondent from Brunswick to Debow’s, a widely circulated magazine of “agricultural, commercial, and industrial progress and resources” wrote that the lumber trade in south Georgia and north Florida was “assuming proportions almost incredible” and a fit enticement to an investor looking for a business with ‘so little risk and so certain remuneration.’” William E. Dodge, a New York importer-exporter of metals and timber from the Northeast, Midwest and Canada came to Georgia in the late nineteenth century with a plan: “as merchants, we want to see the South gain her normal position in the commerce of the country.” In other words, Dodge viewed timber as a source of “one-off cash returns” and as the timber was removed, he said, “at least two thirds of the Company can be sold ….for good average cotton land.” Dodge thought that once the timber was gone, the region could make an easy transition into more stable markets, primarily cotton, and regain its dominance in that agricultural market.
By 1911 the Hilton Dodge Company owned seven mills, 552,388 timber acres in Georgia and South Carolina estimated by financial analysts at Moody’s to contain 3.5 million and 4 billion feet of high-class timber, mostly cypress and long and short leaf yellow pine. The Darien mill was reported to be able to saw two million board timber in one week. The mill at Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island, the third largest in the country at that time, was capable of handling 125,000 Ft per day. The Brunswick Advertiser in 1880 reported that 1000 persons “receive their sustenance directly or indirectly from the St. Simons Mills.” The Ceylon mill in Camden County employed 500 persons. Small company towns grew up near the mills with post offices, housing for mill workers, and a commissary.
The industry told itself and its clients that Georgia’s forests were inexhaustible. By 1917, Georgia’s timber industry collapsed. The rapid expansion of transportation by railroads and portable sawmills led to widespread logging of valuable pines. By the early twentieth century “Glynn County, near Brunswick, was said to be thoroughly milled, turpentined, and cross-tied.” The Hilton-Dodge Company shuttered in 1916.
Timber products industry did not die in Glynn County. In 1911 a new plant producing rosin and turpentine from pine stumps opened. This plant, later Hercules then Pinova, continued to produce chemicals until it closed in June 2023 after a fire. In 1936 Mead Corporation and Scott Paper formed a joint venture called Brunswick Pulp Paper, the first pulp mill located in the southeast U.S. and its success would be dependent on newly developed process for producing pulp from southern pine trees. When this plant, now Georgia Pacific Cellulose, celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2013, retired employee D.K. Boyd, said that his motivation for working at GP Cellulose was security. Sometimes an employer’s check would bounce, but at GP “No worrying about your check being good. You give them what they ask for and they give you what you ask for.” Today, forest products are still shipped out of the Port of Brunswick.
Sources:
Thomas F. Armstrong, “Georgia Lumber Laborers, 1880-1917: The Social Implications of Work”,
Georgia Historical Quarterly, Winter, 1983, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 435-450
Margaret Davis Cate, Early Days of Coastal Georgia, 1955 (1974. Ft. Frederica Assoc. UGA Press)
“Gascoigne Bluff” essay by Margaret Davis Cate, reprinted in www.glynngen.com edited by Amy Hedrick
Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands, 1924. (1992, UGA Press)
Albert G. Way, “Long leaf Pine, from Forest to Fiber: Production, Consumption and the Cutover on Georgia’s Coastal Plains, 1865-1900” in Coastal Nature Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast, ed. Paul Sutter and Paul Pressley, UGA Press, 2018.
Song Notes by Eric S. Crawford and Nathan Salsburg for The Complete Friends of Old Time Music: Bessie Jones, John Davis and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Smithsonian Folkways
Video of retired employees produced for Georgia Pacific Brunswick 75th anniversary, 2013) part of Marshes of Glynn Digital Exhibit, for the exhibit “People & Progress: 85 Years of Pulp Production in Brunswick, Georga.”www.moglibraries.org
“Hercules in History” www.herculesbrunswick.com
“Huron Smith in Georgia”, UGA Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, www.willson.uga.edu
“The Turpentine Trail” David Cecelski, July 11, 2021, www.davidcecelski.com
Leslie Edwards, “Environmental History of Georgia”, May 2004, New Georgia Encyclopedia,www.georgiaencyclopedia.org
John McGuire, “Living on Longleaf: How Humans Shaped the Piney Woods Ecosystem,” in The Natural Georgia Series:The Fire Forest. www.sherpaguides.com