Sapelo Island

Sapelo is the Gullah island — the 16,500-acre barrier island where Hog Hammock is the last private community, the descendants of the enslaved Africans who worked Spalding's plantations still on the land their people bought after the war. The shell middens are 4,000 years old; the community is the living one.

The island was the empire — Thomas Spalding's sugar and Sea Island cotton, the 385 enslaved laborers in the 1850s, the tabby mansion that's now the Reynolds house. The freedmen bought their land back — the William Hillery Company's 1871 purchase, the communities that are now Hog Hammock.

The island is mostly the state's — the Reynolds estate sold to Georgia in 1975, the marine institute and the estuarine reserve on the research land, the 434 acres of Hog Hammock that are the community's last hold. The file keeps the island's layering: the Guale middens, the plantation empire, the freedmen's land, and the Gullah community that's still there.

Sapelo is the archive's Gullah file — the island where the descendants of the enslaved still own their land, the Spalding empire's ruins, and the community that's been there since before the Civil War.