Sapelo Island: The Last Gullah Stronghold

Getting to Sapelo Island requires a ferry. There is no bridge. That geographical fact, which has protected the island's Hog Hammock community for generations, is now a source of economic vulnerability as much as cultural protection.

Hog Hammock is home to approximately fifty full-time residents. They are the direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the island's plantations in the antebellum period, people who came from the same West and Central African coastal regions as the enslaved population throughout the Gullah/Geechee corridor. They have maintained, in concentrated form, the language, the foodways, the basket-making traditions, and the community structure that characterize Gullah culture across the Sea Islands.

The isolation that made this possible is also the isolation that makes staying hard. The island has no school beyond elementary age. It has limited medical facilities. Young people who want secondary education, higher education, or economic opportunity have to leave. Some come back. Increasingly, they don't. The population of Hog Hammock has declined substantially over the past several decades, from a community of several hundred to the approximately fifty who remain year-round.

The state of Georgia owns most of Sapelo Island and manages it as a wildlife reserve. Access is through a state-run ferry service, and visitor numbers are limited. The Hog Hammock community exists within a state-managed landscape, which creates a complicated relationship between the people who have been on the island for generations and the government that now administers the land around them.

The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor includes Sapelo in its five-hundred-mile span from North Carolina to Florida. What Hog Hammock represents, a living community rather than a historic site, is exactly what the corridor was established to protect. Whether protection is sufficient without economic opportunity is the question the community is living with now.