At the height of the travel season, tourists around the country are wandering through restored villages, adding a sense of history to their family vacations. But here, 35 miles south of Savannah, in a 104-acre living history museum called Seabrook Village, tourists find life 150 years ago linked to the local community’s modern-day challenges.
Visitors from kindergarteners to Ph.D.s to drop-in tourists tour the site for a hands-on experience of rural African-American culture from the 1860s to 1930. They churn butter, grind sugar cane, shuck corn and slap whitewash onto walls.
But Seabrook is more than just another historic village. Self-sufficient and governed by a biracial local board, the project’s goal is to become a hub for management-level job training for local residents. It also aims to encourage the return of profitable small-lot farming to this part of coastal Georgia.
The guides, all local volunteers, believe Midway’s past can preserve its economic future. Already, residents are cultivating land for cash crops for the first time in years, and good-paying jobs are expected to follow as the village expands.
“We are proud of our heritage,” said Anna Stevens, 59. “It was a struggle back then, but they survived. And we’re surviving, too.”
In this coastal Georgia region where Sherman granted freedmen 40 acres and a mule, the people historically pulled fish from the local waters, dug oysters and on their own land sowed red peas, swamp rice, melon, okra and corn.
But world wars, pressures from the outside world and the economic scale of modern agriculture intruded irrevocably on a simple lifestyle, and by the 1980s, few farmers remained. The unemployment rate was 9 percent, and annual per capita income was less than $8,500.
Jerry Pennick, director of the Land Assistance Fund of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, said such local loss of farmland is part of a national trend in which black Americans have lost 55 percent of their rural land base.
Of the 57,000 African-American-owned farms encompassing 4.2 million acres in 1978, only about one-third remained by 1992, Pennick said.
Along with giving up their farming past, in 1988 Seabrook villagers decided to demolish the one-room school built around 1900. It had not been used for classes since 1947.
Resident Laura Devendorf decided this was going too far. Not knowing where her resistance would lead, she pleaded with her neighbors to save the schoolhouse.
“We said you can’t, you really can’t. When it’s gone it’s gone,” Devendorf said. “And they said, you can have it.”
In leading the reconstruction project, all Devendorf intended was to preserve the school as a symbol of the black community’s commitment to education. But, on dedication day as guests arrived and former students and teachers squeezed behind desks, emotions took hold.
“There was this murmuring throughout the school. People were swept away by their memories,” said Devendorf. A collective vision grew of a venture that would preserve community activities and values and also provide local jobs.
This year, village descendant and carpenter John Stevens sowed his third commercial crop of red peas. He had bad luck. Deer decimated row upon row after an electric fence failed. But Stevens plans to replant this summer.
“That’s the way we do at Seabrook. We’ll have better luck the next time,” he said.
Deborah Mack, an anthropologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., says Seabrook is a powerful civic model of how people can define their past and decide their future on their own terms. Mack has included some of John Stevens’ traditionally patterned furniture in a collection now traveling to American museums.
In addition to preserving a unique coastal culture, the Seabrook participants are learning what power they have and how to use it effectively, Mack said. “For most rural African-American people, that has never been an option,” she said.
