Seeing Sapelo
A spit of land off the coast of Georgia, Sapelo Island is a time capsule of Southern history. Still only reachable by boat, its 16,500 acres of pristine coastline and maritime forest have seen societies rise and fall, from the native Guale people to Spanish colonizers, and from plantation owners to today’s Gullah-Geechee community of Hog Hammock. A new coffee table book shares both that far-reaching past and the island’s present-day beauty. In
Sapelo: People and Place on a Georgia Sea Island, author Buddy Sullivan, a Georgia native who spent twenty years managing the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve, explores the history, culture, and ecology of a place that has captivated him. “People who have worked on Sapelo or who have lived there all their lives don’t want to be anywhere else,” he says. “Sapelo is in my blood.”
In addition to Sullivan’s text, the book includes both black-and-white archival images and more than a hundred color pictures by photographer Benjamin Galland, who spent more than a year canvassing both Hog Hammock and the island’s state-protected wild lands to capture everything from ancient shell mounds to lowland pine forests to a lighthouse under a starry sky. “There aren’t a lot of places left where you can get lost in the Lowcountry,” Galland says. “But on Sapelo, you can wander all day on dirt roads and see the remnants of yesteryear.”
