SSAAHC is a nonprofit organization that came into being as a response to the threat of encroachment by development in the three African-American neighborhoods on St. Simons Island. SSAAHC is made up of African-American property owners and concerned citizens alike who care about preserving the African-American land, heritage, and culture on St. Simons, recognizing that St. Simons was built on the backs of the African-American community.

As St. Simons continues to grow, pressures from increased land speculation have caused African-American families to sell out and move off the ancestral lands where they have resided for the last 150 years. Sites and structures precious to the history and memory of the community are being torn down and built over. Bit by bit, the African-American heritage on St. Simons is being erased and African-American islanders are leaving the very community their ancestors made possible.

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.

Joe Armstrong and John Davis were one-time leaders of the stevedore crews at the Hilton Dodge Mills on St. Simons Island. Joe lived on the South End. John and his brother Peter were from Harrington. Henry Merchant and Floyd White from Retreat also worked the docks. These “strong husky men” handled large timbers with skill and loaded the ships carefully so the lumber “would not shift and cause damage to the vessel during the ocean voyage…In order that they might all pull together to move those timbers, they sang as they worked and, at the proper place in the song, gave a great pull ” wrote Margaret Davis Cate in Early Days of Coastal Georgia (1955). Joe and Floyd shared these work songs and stories with Lydia Parrish who published them in 1924 in her Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. They described to Mrs. Parrish loading terms such as “blockin timber,” “wing-tier,” “kelson knees,” “beam-dog,” “block and tickle,” and “narrow trunkin.’” They pointed out that “Short lumber went into the hatch” but for long lumber, they said, you had to “knock out the port” which was generally in the bow. “Pullin’ lumber” meant shoving it on a long greased skid, waist high, made up of a series of carpenter’s horses. A song “Call me Hangin’ Johnny” was used in loading lumber when six men on each side of the rope hauled on the block and tackle when putting a great “stick” in place on board a vessel. Joe said the “stick” was timber 16”x16” and 40’ long. Local tradition in Harrington says some “sticks” found floating offshore were retrieved and used in building the Harrington School. Joe’s wife Julia Armstrong told Mrs. Parrish that on one day there may have been as many as thirty-five vessels lined up at The Mills. Like earlier plantation songs “Pay me my money down” reflected the relationship between workers and the owners at the 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.