Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast

PREFACE

Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture had its origins in a well-received symposium on the environmental history of the Georgia coast that took place in Savannah during 2016. Scholars from around the United States made presentations on topics that ranged from Native Americans on barrier islands to the struggle over groundwater in the twentieth century. The organizers of the event were expecting a solid turnout but were surprised when over four hundred people showed up for the first presentation on a Thursday afternoon. It was an even greater surprise when most stayed until the closing at noon on Saturday.

Georgians are fascinated by a coast where nine of the thirteen barrier islands are undeveloped and five unconnected to the mainland by bridge. In the whole of the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Miami, the Georgia coast stands out today as atypical, a stretch where relatively few lights interrupt the blackness of night. However, that appearance can be deceptive. Over the centuries, the human presence has led to successive transformations of land and landscape in ways that raise multiple questions. The assumption that nature’s course is a progression from pristine to despoiled proves to be simplistic.

The symposium took aim at building a bridge between current scholarship on the history of the American South and the booming field of environmental history. The first comprehensive environmental history study of the Georgia coast came at a relatively late date—the publication of Mart Stewart’s What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (University of Georgia Press, 1996). Today Stewart’s volume remains the foundation for all subsequent studies. The chapters in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture continue his work of exploring how successive communities of Native Americans, British imperialists, planters and enslaved people, lumbermen, wage-earning freedmen, vacationing industrialists, truck farmers, and river engineers developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced distinctive coastal landscapes.

It took two years of effort to bring the conference about. The original idea lay with Mark Finlay, an environmental historian at Armstrong Atlantic State University, who secured the backing of the Ossabaw Island Foundation, Armstrong Atlantic State, and the Wormsloe Institute of Environmental History. After the first meeting, Dr. Finlay was killed in an automobile accident while returning from a history conference. The symposium was dedicated to his memory.

The sponsors of the symposium and of this book represent important forces in the preservation and conservation of the coast. The Ossabaw Island Foundation promotes and manages educational, cultural, and scientific programs on Ossabaw, the third largest island off the coast of Georgia. It does so in partnership with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Armstrong State University, renamed Georgia Southern University–Armstrong Campus, located in Savannah, has created a growing role for itself in environmental matters. The Wormsloe Institute, located at the site of one of Georgia’s oldest land grants and now a part of the University of Georgia, conducts interdisciplinary research across a wide range of fields, including ecology, geography, archaeology, and history.

Standing behind this project were Lisa Bayer, director of the University of Georgia Press, and Mick Gusinde-Duffy, senior editor of the press. It is fortunate that Paul Sutter, a major figure in environmental history, agreed to be the editor of this volume. He served as the founding editor of the University of Georgia Press’s Environmental History and the American South book series while on the faculty at the University of Georgia and is now in the middle of a productive and busy career teaching and publishing at the University of Colorado Boulder. I had the pleasure of a ringside seat watching his careful editing of the chapters as they came from the authors, and I appreciate his remarkable skill at shaping themes.

Our hope is that Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture will provide a fresh perspective on the history of the Georgia coast and a meaningful framework for discussion about its future.

Paul M. Pressly

Coeditor

COASTAL NATURE, COASTAL CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

The History of Conservation and the Conservation of History along the Georgia Coast

PAUL S. SUTTER

In the March 27, 1971, issue of the New Yorker, John McPhee published the second in a triptych of essays on postwar conservation icon David Brower. Brower was the John Muir of his time, an unyielding champion of the American wilderness and a leading voice in the then-cresting environmental movement. As the executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969, Brower had led the battle against the construction of a dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument and then fought for almost a decade to secure passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. In the process, he built the Sierra Club into a formidable political force. After the club’s board ousted him in 1969, for financial mismanagement and general defiance, Brower immediately founded Friends of the Earth, and a year later he founded the League of Conservation Voters. By 1971 Brower was one of the leading voices of the modern environmental movement as well as one of its great institution builders. Hence McPhee’s interest in him.

Rather than writing a conventional profile of Brower, McPhee used each of his three essays to situate Brower with an ostensible adversary in a place of environmental controversy and to report the ensuing conversation. A week earlier, on March 20, McPhee’s first installment had featured Brower and a mining geologist named Charles Park on a backpacking trip into the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington’s North Cascade Mountains. Beneath Glacier Peak sat a lode of copper that the Kennecott Copper Company hoped to exploit by using the mining exception to the Wilderness Act. The third and most memorable installment in the series, which appeared on April 3, recounted a float trip down the Colorado River with legendary commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and arch dam builder Floyd Dominy, with whom Brower had repeatedly clashed during his conservation career. Sandwiched between these stories about the fate of two majestic western wilderness landscapes—a mountain and a river—was the shortest and least assuming of the three pieces, which featured Brower in conversation with a real estate developer named Charles E. Fraser over the fate of an island—Georgia’s Cumberland Island. Fraser considered himself a conservationist too, but he likened strict preservationists such as Brower to modern druids for their apparent preference for unspoiled nature over the needs of people. McPhee adapted and amplified this epithet as the title for his series and for the book that followed, Encounters with the Arch-druid.¹

Today Charles Fraser is best known for two signature resort developments that bookend and set off the Georgia coast—Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina and Amelia Island Plantation on Amelia Island in Florida. As large-scale residential and recreational developments go, they have their virtues. Both have been lauded as models for design in harmony with nature. Fraser clustered homes to minimize the footprint of his communities, and he kept them away from beaches and other fragile habitats, which allowed him to preserve large portions of these properties in their natural states. Fraser also blended his architectural and landscape designs with the local environment, and he made aggressive use of restrictive deeds and covenants to achieve conservation goals and aesthetic uniformity within his planned communities. He hoped most of all to avoid the crass commercialism that had come to define so much coastal development. In 1968, Fraser purchased three thousand acres on Cumberland Island, the largest and southernmost of Georgia’s barrier islands, and he was planning a similar resort development there, to be called Cumberland Oaks, when McPhee arranged for he and Brower to meet.²

At the time of the Fraser-Brower encounter, Cumberland Island had only eleven permanent residents and the East Coast’s longest undeveloped beach, which made it attractive to both preservationists and developers. (Cumberland had also attracted the federal government’s attention; it had been the runner-up to Cape Canaveral as the site for a major NASA launch facility for the U.S. space program in the early 1960s.) As significantly, the almost century-long reign of the Carnegie family as the primary stewards of the island was beginning to fray. Fraser had acquired his Cumberland Island real estate from three descendants of Andrew Carnegie’s brother Thomas, who, with his wife, Lucy, had purchased most of the island in the early 1880s. By the late 1960s, the financially stressed Carnegie heirs, freed from a restrictive trust that Lucy had put on the property, were divided over how, and even whether, to maintain the island as a family retreat. It was a familiar dynamic that had played out and would play out on many of Georgia’s other barrier islands.³

FIGURE Int.1. Charles Fraser, the developer of Sea Pines and Amelia Island Plantations, circa 1962.

Courtesy of the Charles Fraser Estate.

The Carnegie heirs and some of Charles Fraser’s other opponents viewed him as an arriviste threat to the patrician conservation regime that had prevailed on Cumberland Island since the end of Reconstruction, but the Fraser family had deep Georgia roots. The first Frasers had landed in New England with the Puritans, but they soon drifted south, and by the early nineteenth century they were one of Georgia’s largest slaveholding families. According to McPhee, Fraser liked to remind the critics of his proposed Cumberland development that his family had been substantial landowners in the state well before the Carnegies had even migrated to the Americas. Charles was himself a product of coastal Georgia, even though his most important work would be done at its edges. He was born in 1929 in Hinesville, the seat of Liberty County, which sat in the piney woods just back of the coast. The Hinesville of Fraser’s childhood was a quiet town, although that changed in 1940 when the U.S. military purchased 280,000 adjacent acres and turned it into Fort Stewart, which quickly became a vibrant mustering ground for the American invasion of Europe. This was but one example of the strong role that the military— and military considerations—would continue to play in coastal Georgia’s environmental history. Fraser’s father, General Joseph B. Fraser, was himself a military man, but he was also a successful lumber merchant, timber being another industry that had a profound impact on the region. From the end of Reconstruction until about World War I, the timber industry cut the region’s longleaf pine forest in a fit of activity that remade an entire bioregion. And thanks in part to the pioneering work of Savannah resident Charles Herty, the young Charles Fraser witnessed a new chapter in the region’s forest history: the rise of the pulp and paper industry that would again transform the region’s environment after World War II.⁴

Charles Fraser would make his mark by taking his father’s timber business in an entirely different direction. Joseph Fraser and several Hinesville partners had formed the Hilton Head Company in 1949 and soon purchased most of Hilton Head Island, just across the state line from Savannah, with plans to cut its timber, much of it second-growth. At the time, the island had several hundred residents, most of them African American descendants of former slaves who had either worked the island’s antebellum Sea Island cotton plantations or had fled to the island during the Civil War.⁵ Hilton Head was a key site for the Port Royal Experiment, an ambitious but short-lived program that the historian Willie Lee Rose famously called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. The Port Royal Experiment involved the Union Army and northern philanthropists resettling freedpeople on former plantation lands, restoring plantation production with wage labor, and creating schools, churches, hospitals, and even housing for freedpeople. In fact, Union general Ormsby Mitchel oversaw the creation of an entire town for resettled freedpeople on Hilton Head, called Mitchelville in his honor. It came complete with rectilinear streets, quarter-acre lots, modest wooden homes, civil and religious institutions, rules about community behavior and sanitation, and democratic self-governance. While the Port Royal Experiment did not survive the end of the war, and Mitchelville suffered when the Union Army left a few years later, the town lasted until the late nineteenth century, and a remnant settlement lingered into the early twentieth century.⁶ By the time that Charles Fraser encountered Hilton Head and first began to imagine a different kind of planned community for the southern end of the island, Mitchelville had ceased to exist, but it deserves a place of primacy in the history of Hilton Head real estate development. Charles Fraser, in other words, was not working with a blank slate.

Fraser knew that Hilton Head had a history, but he also saw a region poised on the edge of substantial change, and he was ready to push the island in a new direction. Fraser’s father and the other Hilton Head Company partners soon divided their holdings, with Joseph getting the southern portion of the island. Meanwhile, after he finished an undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, Charles Fraser headed to Yale Law School, where he mastered the legal tactics that he later used to shape and control his resort developments. Fraser then purchased his father’s portion of the island, and beginning in 1957 he set about developing Sea Pines Plantation. In its mixture of golf and other active recreation with residential real estate, Sea Pines spawned numerous imitators along the southern coast during the postwar years. More importantly, it was but one example of how postwar coastal development overwrote landscapes with deep and complex environmental histories.⁷

Sea Pines emerged at a moment of reckoning for many of the Lowcountry’s barrier islands and their residents, when the heirs of wealthy industrial families and the descendants of slaves were both struggling to retain their legal, historical, and cultural claims to the islands, and when new economic forces like the postwar timber boom, the industrialization of the South, the incipient Sunbelt migration, the rise of automobility, the growth of southern tourism, and new forms of residential development threatened to transform landscapes that had slowly re-naturalized over the previous three-fourths of a century.

By the time Charles Fraser purchased his Cumberland Island acreage a decade later, an additional force had entered the mix—the modern environmental movement, embodied by David Brower. In building Sea Pines, Fraser had operated largely unencumbered by organized environmental opposition, but he would not be so lucky on Cumberland Island. Brower, it turns out, was the least of his problems. In McPhee’s profile, Brower seemed at once immune to Fraser’s provocations and amenable to his vision for a contained and responsible resort. If a portion of the island was inevitably going to be developed, then Brower agreed that Fraser was the person to do it. McPhee had to throw in an additional character—Sam Candler, scion of the Coca-Cola founders, whose family owned the northern tenth of Cumberland Island—to give voice to the strict preservationist position to which Candler and a number of the Carnegie heirs still adhered. It was a position that, in the absence of sustaining family wealth, had come to rest on the prospect of National Park Service stewardship for the island. As McPhee made clear, vast industrial profits had made possible the beautiful and fragile anachronism that was Cumberland Island at the beginning of the 1970s. It was a place whose private seclusion and rustic comforts he enjoyed guiltily, knowing that, no matter who prevailed in the battle over the island’s future, Cumberland was going to change.⁸

Charles Fraser never developed Cumberland Oaks. Environmentalists, including the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and Carnegie heirs, whose cooperation was essential to Fraser’s development plan, offered so much opposition that Fraser eventually sold his property to the National Park Foundation, which then transferred the land to the federal government. Most of the island’s other residents agreed to sell out as well, though they retained certain exclusive property rights for several generations into the future. In 1972 Congress created Cumberland Island National Seashore from these consolidated properties, a decidedly happy ending for the archdruid and his followers. Ten years later Congress designated almost ten thousand acres of Cumberland Island National Seashore as wilderness.⁹

Cumberland Island’s public protection came amid a punctuated flurry of environmental activism and state and federal environmental legislation that birthed the modern environmental movement. The environmental movement, in turn, gave new meaning to the Georgia coast. At the state level, the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act of 1970 limited development in the hundreds of thousands of acres of marsh that sat between Georgia’s barrier islands and its mainland, an achievement made possible in part by the research of ecologists such as the University of Georgia’s Eugene Odum. While the poet Sidney Lanier had sung the praises of the aesthetics of Georgia’s coastal marshes almost a century earlier, it took the insights of modern ecosystem ecology to create an ironclad case for their economic and environmental value. In the process, the Georgia coast became a vital center for research in coastal ecology and oceanography. The many federal environmental achievements of this period, from the Wilderness Act of 1964 through the Endangered Species Act of 1973, also shaped the Georgia coast. To give just one example, the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970, banned DDT in 1972, assuring that coastal visitors for generations to come would enjoy the aerial grace of brown pelicans gliding in formation above the strand. (Despite their current ubiquity, it is worth remembering that the Fish and Wildlife Service removed brown pelicans from the Endangered Species List only in 2009.) The late 1960s and early 1970s were thus pivotal years in the protection of Georgia’s coastal nature, and nothing better symbolized that than national park status for Georgia’s largest barrier island. More than that, though, John McPhee’s choice to include the Cumberland story in his profile of David Brower reminds us of the Georgia coast’s quiet but important place in the rise of the larger environmental movement.¹⁰

The story of Cumberland Island National Seashore’s creation is only one among many such stories—each unique but all of a sort—that help to explain a distinctive and defining feature of Georgia’s barrier islands: most of them, to this day, remain undeveloped, and many of them enjoy formal conservation status of one sort or another. Blackbeard, Wolf, and Wassaw Islands are all national wildlife refuges managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. All of Ossabaw Island and most of Sapelo Island is owned by the State of Georgia and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Ossabaw is a heritage preserve, the first of its kind in the state, and public use is limited to scientific, cultural, and educational activities. Much of Sapelo is protected as a national estuarine research reserve, a designation overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Jekyll Island is a state park, owned by the State of Georgia but managed by an independent authority—the Jekyll Island Authority—that oversees the island and provides a mix of preserved and developed tourist landscapes. A few of Georgia’s other barrier islands, including St. Catherines and Little St. Simons, are protected in private ownership, with almost no development. Aside from portions of Jekyll, only Tybee Island, St. Simons Island, and Sea Island are substantially developed. Surely this happy state of affairs, this distinctive conservation patchwork, can be classed as a victory for environmentalists.

Environmentalism, however, is always more complicated than it seems. At the very moment that John McPhee was chaperoning the encounter between David Brower and Charles Fraser and listening in on their conversations about the future of Cumberland Island, Fraser was deeply embroiled in another environmental controversy—one that McPhee only briefly mentioned in his profile. In 1969 the German chemical company BASF, lured by the state of South Carolina’s aggressive recruiting efforts, announced plans to locate a major manufacturing facility on Victoria Bluff, overlooking Port Royal Sound, just inland from Hilton Head Island. Strong opposition to the plan emerged quickly, and the fight against the BASF facility soon gained considerable national attention. It helped that the controversy reached its peak just as millions of Americans celebrated the first Earth Day in April 1970. Barry Commoner, the man who Time magazine had just called the Paul Revere of Ecology, was enlisted in the fight. But anchoring the opposition to BASF’s plans were residents of Hilton Head’s exclusive resort communities, including Sea Pines, and Charles Fraser emerged as one of their most vocal leaders. While Fraser and many of the other well-connected Hilton Head residents who organized and bankrolled the campaign against BASF resisted calling themselves environmentalists, and while some professed environmentalists involved in the campaign felt uneasy about their alliance with wealthy resort developers and privileged homeowners, the advocacy of Fraser and his allies nonetheless illustrated the role that these new coastal residents, most of whom had moved to the region for its environmental amenities, would play in defining the importance of coastal environmental protection and even what counted as environmental protection. By pitting Fraser against Brower and preservation against development, McPhee’s piece had missed how vital Fraser and his constituents were to setting the modern coastal environmental agenda. Environmental protection and real estate development had a more complicated relationship than McPhee let on, and the BASF controversy made that plain.¹¹

FIGURE INT.2. African American protesters marching in favor of the proposed BASF plant that would have been built near Hilton Head Island and to which Charles Fraser led the opposition. The photo was published May 7, 1970, in the Beaufort Gazette (Bluffton, SC). Photo by Bessie Hookstra/Beaufort Gazette.

The BASF controversy also illustrated some of the racial complexities involved in the environmental politics of coastal protection circa 1970. For their part, BASF and its allies in the state’s political and business communities insisted that the plant would play a major role in alleviating the region’s poverty, particularly in providing employment to African Americans, and they portrayed Fraser and his allies not as selfless protectors of coastal nature but privileged defenders of their wealthy enclaves. How African Americans felt about the proposed facility was a little more complicated. While a group of African American commercial fishermen allied themselves with the anti-BASF forces, concerned that pollution from the plant would affect the productivity of coastal waters, NAACP members and many African American activists demonstrated in favor of the plant and the jobs it would bring. But again the environmentalists prevailed, and this time Charles Fraser was on the winning side. In January 1971, just two months before McPhee’s article on Brower and Fraser appeared, BASF abandoned its plans for the Victoria Bluff site and located its facility instead in a part of the new industrial South where environmental opposition was less well-heeled: a highly industrialized stretch of the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, that soon became known as Cancer Alley.¹²

One of the central story lines in the environmental history of the Georgia coast is that real estate developers such as Charles Fraser, as a rule, have not prevailed there. To a great degree, this collection of essays and the vibrant symposium in Savannah in February 2016 that made it possible grew from a realization that coastal Georgia’s unique history of conservation helps to make the region distinctive and anchors a sense of place that many coastal Georgians carry with them. That an academic conference drew an audience of more than four hundred people, and that that audience remained admirably engaged through almost two days of presentations in a windowless auditorium, speaks to this acute sense that the nature of the coast matters to local residents. But another central story line in the environmental history of the Georgia coast can be found precisely in Charles Fraser’s own history of environmental advocacy and in the sorts of divides about what constitutes coastal conservation and who benefits from it, which the BASF controversy laid bare. While environmental historians often celebrate the victories that conservationists have won over the forces of concentrated economic power, they also have made it clear that when environmental advocates speak for nature they are usually also speaking for themselves and that appeals for environmental protection often shroud other ideologies and interests. This does not mean that calls for environmental protection are always sullied by ulterior motives, but it does mean that we need to interrogate the power dynamics of environmental activism and who benefits when nature is saved.¹³

Once we recognize this double-edged nature of environmental advocacy, the question for the Georgia coast and its residents becomes this: how do we value and protect this place in ways that all of its residents can find meaning and satisfaction in? To answer this question well, we need to pay as much attention to culture as we do to nature, and we need to recognize that we do not save nature from history but in history. Beneath the patina of wildness—and in the case of Cumberland Island, even designated wilderness—that has come to characterize most of Georgia’s barrier islands, there are complex and contested environmental histories that need to be part of any conservation vision for the region. If one of the most important tasks of the field of environmental history is to bring historical perspectives to contemporary questions about environmental protection, the Georgia coast is a fruitful place to do so.

The Savannah symposium that gave birth to this book was the brainchild of the late Mark Finlay, a professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University who was working on a book on the preservation of Georgia’s barrier islands, with a focus on Ossabaw Island, when he died in 2013. Mark had approached Paul Pressly of the Ossabaw Island Foundation to float the idea of a conference in the wake of a successful symposium that Paul had organized on African American life in the Georgia Lowcountry, a gathering that also resulted in an excellent edited collection.¹⁴ Mark and Paul both recognized that scholars and others interested in the Georgia coast would profit from environmental approaches to its history and that environmental historians had much to learn from studying the Georgia coast. In many ways, the inspiration for this volume was Mark’s unfinished history of Georgia’s coastal preservation.

Yet celebrating the diverse ways in which Georgia’s coastal nature now enjoys protection functions only as the entry point for this volume, which also contends with deep veins of history and culture in the region. One only needs to examine Cumberland Island, with its rich historical stratigraphy and the management challenges that come with preserving much of it as a wilderness, to see the confounding ways in which the Georgia coast’s past has complicated what conservation means in the present. While environmental historians are keen to reveal the role and place of nature in history and to show that environmental entities and forces have mattered in the course of human events, an equally important task on the Georgia coast is to reveal the place of history in what we would otherwise recognize as nature. The essays in this volume work in sophisticated ways at this intersection of nature and culture, and they warn us that, even as we do the important work of protecting and finding meaning in nonhuman nature, we ought not to let the natural grow over and engulf the cultural or to bulldoze history in the name of wildness. On the Georgia coast, the history of conservation is inextricable from the conservation of history.

The following essays also point out that the environmental history of coastal Georgia has necessarily occurred in larger regional, national, and global contexts that deserve our careful attention. Indeed, the coast’s conservation success stories are implicated in other social and environmental histories, some of which we might not want to treat in quite so celebratory a fashion. How, for example, are we to judge the conserving work of the Carnegies, Coffins, Candlers, Reynoldses, and other wealthy families when we consider the larger environmental implications of the steel, automobile, soft drink, and tobacco-processing industries from which they made the vast fortunes that helped to buffer Georgia’s coast against development? When we ask that kind of question, we realize that the conservation of the Georgia coast is really only a single entry on a much larger balance sheet. Indeed, a myopic focus on the Georgia coast itself can obscure the more expansive and interconnected histories that give the coast its meanings as a place. Another great achievement of this volume, then, is to provide us with some intriguing ways of thinking about how to define and bound the Georgia coast and how to situate it in the larger world.

MAP Int.1. The Georgia Coast

The Georgia coast is defined by its barrier island geography. It is not unique in being fronted by such islands, which extend north into North Carolina and south into Florida, but it is certainly coherent as such. Behind those islands are hundreds of thousands of acres of tidal marsh, another unifying physiographical feature of the coastal region. Flowing through and beyond those islands and marshes are innumerable veins of tidal influence that pull the coast, as the meeting place of ocean and land, farther inland. If we consider not just the present edges between land and ocean but past ones as well, the Georgia coast becomes a more expansive region, one that has stretched, in a deep history, from fall line to continental shelf. But coastal Georgia cannot be defined by geography and environment alone. As a place, as a landscape, it is the product of human-environmental interactions and transformations and of human thought and feeling across centuries. It is a place defined by culture as much as by nature, by human presences and practices, from distinctive native lifeways to the tidal-flow rice culture that defined the coast as a nineteenth-century place, and from the persistence of culturally resilient African American communities to the region’s emergent resort complex and conservation regime. The essays in this volume do not hew to a strict definition of the Georgia coast as a region, but they all home in on the same place and sense of place.

Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture begins with an essay by Mart Stewart, a revised version of the keynote address that he delivered at the 2016 symposium. Stewart was an obvious choice for the keynote since his 1996 book What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 has long been the definitive environmental history of the region.¹⁵ Stewart’s book did many things well, but I want to highlight three of its achievements. First, it provided a rich rendering of the tensions during Georgia’s early English settlement between the formal landscape that James Oglethorpe and his followers envisioned for the place and the impromptu vernacular landscape that they created, suggesting that, from the very beginning of English settlement, the coastal environment reshaped settlers’ land use practices and mental maps. Second, Stewart’s analysis of tidal-flow rice cultivation and the human and nonhuman energies that made it work continues to be, two decades later, the state of the art for environmental histories of slavery and systems of plantation production. To those who might see the absence of an essay focused on coastal Georgia’s rice landscapes as a glaring omission in this volume, I can only implore you to read Stewart’s treatment of the subject. Finally, Stewart’s portrait of the post-plantation transformation of the Georgia coast in all of its myriad forms—not only the slow fadeout of the engineered landscapes of rice production but also the rise of aristocratic landscapes of conservation and recreation, the impacts of industrial timbering, the rise of market gardening, and the persistence of African American communities and environmental lifeways—has served as a starting point for many of the essays in this volume.

Stewart’s essay in this volume builds on many of those themes, but he also provides us with an essential meditation on the place of coastal Georgia in the larger world. He does so by focusing first on the dominance of islands in our sense of the place, and on the rich cultural history of islands and how we have thought with them. Islands have always been places for imagining bounded utopias; they have been retreats and preserves that we have kept separate from the mainland of human experience, with important implications for environmental thinking. Stewart shows that all sorts of people have dreamed on and with Georgia’s barrier islands, and that those dreams are essential to the place and our sense of it even today. Stewart also defines the Georgia coast as a place of edges, particularly ecological ones. The coast may be where land meets sea, but what make the Georgia coast distinctive are its more specific kinds of edginess. Much of the coast is estuarine, where saltwater and freshwater meet and mix in a riot of biological productivity. The coast’s marshes are themselves edgy places, swinging between land and water with the tides and fronting gallery forests in ways that produce their own edge effects. The coast edges into the coastal plain in ways that have been vitally important to the region’s history, and human land uses have created new edges both productive and disruptive. On the Georgia coast, ecotones set the tone. Stewart ends, appropriately, by noting some of the coast’s global dimensions. Its ecology has always been particularly cosmopolitan, its economy has always been one of Atlantic and global connections, and its future is now tied up in incipient global environmental changes that may rewrite the coast’s entire geography. As powerful as island idylls have been to a sense of place along the Georgia coast, Stewart insists that these islands have always been integrated into the mainstream and moving in a sea of change.

That this volume then turns to an essay by David Hurst Thomas seems apropos, for no one has done more to enlighten us about the deep human history that necessarily defines the Georgia coast. Thomas, an archaeologist with the American Museum of Natural History, is best known for the excavations he has led on St. Catherines Island, where, almost forty years ago, he and a team discovered the long-lost site of the Spanish mission Santa Catalina de Guale.¹⁶ Thomas’s contribution to this volume provides a deep historical baseline against which to measure more recent change over time. He reminds us that the coast in its current form is only five thousand years old and that it has some unique biogeographic features that shaped early human history in the region. He also shows us the formative role that Native peoples—the Guale and Timucuan peoples—played in shaping coastal environments over several thousand years and how their lives on these resource-rich islands could never be entirely separated from a larger, continental Native American history. Finally, Thomas reminds us of the formative Spanish era in the coast’s environmental history, an era that predated the arrival of the British by two centuries but is too often ignored in Anglocentric renderings of early Georgia’s history. Part of the problem, as Thomas suggests, is the scant textual evidence for the Native American and Spanish periods, an absence that makes the work of archaeologists so important to chronicling the coast’s early environmental history and integrating it with later periods that have more robust archives. While St. Catherines Island, the focus of Thomas’s essay, is today remarkably undeveloped, in large part because of its archaeological importance, Thomas reminds us that the island was once thoroughly transformed by Native peoples and then Spanish missionaries, and that its landscape remains the most important archive for understanding that history of transformation.

When we think of the early history of the Georgia colony, the first image that probably pops into our minds is Peter Gordon’s famous and much reproduced 1733 view of early Savannah’s grid, an imagined space of urban order hemmed in by endless forest. As Max Edelson aptly puts it, Perhaps no other picture of British colonization represents its fundamental ethos more clearly. Gordon made his sketch at another watershed moment in the history of the Georgia coast, when Oglethorpe and his followers were busy establishing the city of Savannah and other gridded town settlements as places where England’s poor could remake their lives by transforming a wilderness into an ordered agrarian society. Historians have often rendered the story of Savannah’s early settlement and the Georgia colony’s development as a cautionary tale about the inevitable disconnections between imperial longing and environmental reality, a tale that ends in the 1750s when slavery and plantation agriculture undid the colony’s early utopian aims. In his essay on early British cartographic visions of the Georgia coast, Edelson reminds us how important a range of maps were to early imaginings of coastal Georgia as a discrete place and to its evolving function in the larger empire. He also shows us how we can read maps as evidence of the Georgia colony’s drift away from ordered colonization and control and toward a plantation society where the placement of rivers, swamps, and soils mattered more than abstract grids. Edelson insists that eighteenth-century maps were not merely ways of spatially illustrating what we now know as the Georgia coast. Rather, they were evidence of, and arguments for, how coastal colonization was to be organized and whether it would serve expansive territorial sovereignty or limited settlement. In Edelson’s skillful hands, eighteenth-century maps emerge as both sources and forces, as documents that illustrate growing environmental knowledge and as texts whose ideologies shaped environmental transformation in the new world.¹⁷

Another distinctive feature of the Georgia coast, as we have already seen, is the presence of the Gullah Geechee people and culture. Certainly one of the most important nature-culture tensions in contemporary coastal conservation has to do with balancing the protection of nature with recognition of the distinctive history of coastal African Americans in what has come to be known as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which stretches along the coast from southern North Carolina to northern Florida. In her contribution to this volume, Edda Fields-Black takes on the central question of how we are to understand Gullah Geechee identity by interrogating an environmental narrative that she believes has distorted our understanding of the nature, the dynamism, and even the geographical expansiveness of that identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many came to understand the Gullah Geechee as people whose distinctive culture, one shaped by African cultural persistence, was the result of their isolation on island environments that history had left behind. Implicitly taking on this kind of geographical determinism, Fields-Black instead argues that it would be better to see the Gullah Geechee as Lowcountry creoles, people whose distinctive identities predated their supposed island isolation and whose culture was more than the stuff of static African retention and survival.

Tiya Miles begins her essay with a cruel irony: Dunbar Creek, on St. Simons Island, the site of an uprising of Ibo slaves against their captors in 1803 that shaped a regionally distinctive myth of flying Africans, is today the dumping ground for treated effluent from the water pollution control facility that serves the residents of St. Simons and Sea Island. The creek is hemmed in by high-end residential development, and the site of the uprising remains unmarked to this day—except, perhaps, by the supernatural chanting and moaning that some say emanates from the haunted creek. Here is a potent metaphor indeed for how the African experience on the coast has been both obscured and degraded by the forces of development. Miles uses that vignette as a launching pad for her own rich analysis of the myth of flying Africans, the larger African American story-world that it represented, the importance of coastal waters and other aspects of the coastal environment to that story-world, and the surprising place of the Ebo Landing uprising, as it came to be known, in contemporary ghost tourism on the coast.¹⁸ Indeed, Miles suggests that this story-world is a distinctive feature of the Georgia coast, and she intimates that the coast will remain a haunted place until we confront the structural inequalities that have shaped African American experiences in the region. Miles powerfully concludes with a call for a new eco-cultural consciousness that should motivate habits of preservation along the Georgia coast. Miles’s essay, then, is not only a powerful object lesson about what happens when we fail to honor particular peoples and their stories, but also a call to link environmental and historical preservation in innovative ways.

Drew Swanson shifts our attention from the ghosts of the slave trade to another kind of dark tourism that sharply redefined the Georgia coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a growing aesthetic and touristic fascination with the ruins of the plantations that once dominated coastal Georgia and the regeneration of a distinctive coastal nature that became a paradise for sportsmen. In Swanson’s telling, the antebellum plantations of the Georgia coast represented, in the minds of the planter class, the apotheosis of human and environmental mastery, a plantation model that stood in stark contrast to the disorderly, itinerant, and brutal cotton frontier of the Old Southwest. That mastery quickly came unraveled at the end of the Civil War when coastal planters lost their most essential resource—the coerced labor of slaves. Swanson then shows how, after the war, prominent visitors to the region, almost all northern and white, came to find aesthetic pleasure in the picturesque ruins they found along the coast, developing what he calls a rhetoric of ruin that was the genesis of Lowcountry tourism. As plantation agriculture receded from the region and its infrastructure slowly crumbled, northerners found romance in ruination both because it expressed the righteousness of the Union cause and because such landscapes stood in stark contrast to the increasingly industrial nature of much of the rest of the nation. At a time of immense change, history seemed to be running in reverse along the Georgia coast. One benefit of this natural regeneration swallowing a ruined civilization was that