Gullah Geechee Culture
Near St. Simons Island, Georgia
On these sea islands, a culture took root that survives nowhere else in America in quite the same way. The people are the Gullah, called Geechee here in Georgia, the descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans brought to work the rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations of the Lowcountry. Because the barrier islands were cut off from the mainland by tides and marsh, the community held onto its African roots more strongly than almost anywhere else.
They kept a distinct English based creole language, still spoken today, along with African rooted cooking built on rice, okra, and sesame, and crafts like sweetgrass basket weaving. In two thousand six, the United States Congress recognized all of this by creating the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which runs down the coast from North Carolina to Florida and takes in the Georgia coast. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people here founded the interior settlement of Harrington.
Its old schoolhouse, built in the nineteen twenties, still stands as a cultural center, keeping the memory and the living traditions of the Gullah Geechee alive on Saint Simons Island.
