Tag: Sapelo Island

Once FIFA World Cup 2026™ fans have seen Atlanta, an easy road trip beyond the capital will reveal a whole different side of Georgia. From the folklore and forests of its mountains to the rich heritage of its coastal cities and islands, you’ll find spectacular scenery and surprises within just a few hours’ drive.

Sapelo Island might just be the most peaceful place in Georgia. A two-hour drive south of Savannah, it has 24 residents, according to JR Grovner, a native who has been running Sapelo Island Tours since he was 12 years old. Grovner’s family has lived on the island for 10 generations, and Sapelo’s peace and quiet, with its idyllic, untouched beaches and diverse wildlife, has kept him enamored with it his whole life. 

Once you’ve taken a left turn at Landing Road from Highway 99 southbound, roll down your car windows. As you drive east toward the Sapelo Island Visitors Center near Darien, you’ll pass beneath arching oak branches draped in long, lingering Spanish moss, and you’ll begin to notice a different kind of breeze—the rare sort of air that fills lungs with wistful history. But a fog of encroachment is making the future murky for the island’s Hog Hammock community.

Many of the dozen or so islands that make up the Georgia coast are notoriously inaccessible. Most, in fact, are reachable only by ferry or charter boat. Of course, that very remoteness has preserved 100 miles of relatively natural landscape, unmatched along the Eastern Seaboard. Now, researchers and students at Emory University’s departments of environmental sciences and history and its Center for Digital Scholarship (best known for its decades-long effort to document voyages of enslaved people) are creating an online portal, open to the public, that allows anyone to visit the islands virtually. The rapidly expanding Georgia Coast Atlas features flyover footage, video interviews, informative articles, historical documents, annotated maps, and other resources.

Sapelo Island—its residents and wildlife—could be in danger as ocean waters continue to rise. The University of Georgia's Small Satellite Research Lab will launch a satellite roughly 250 miles above Earth that will paint a clear picture of the coming threat.

Cornelia Walker Bailey knew Sapelo Island’s history and was determined to get it straight. As the unofficial griot (a West African term for a historian or storyteller) of Hog Hammock, the last remaining of the original African American communities founded by the island’s population of freed slaves and their descendants, she taught it every chance she got.

Grown at Georgia Coastal Gourmet Farms in Townsend, Georgia, the ruby-red pea has already won over fans like chef Linton Hopkins.

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This house began as a sugar plantation and was damaged during the Civil War.

Cornelia Bailey is a storyteller, activist, author, and business owner, but she’s perhaps best known for being a member of the last generation of African Americans to have been born (in 1945) and raised on Sapelo Island.