We were saddened to hear about the passing of Cornelia Bailey, author and enthusiastic promoter of Geechee culture on the Georgia coast, on October 15, 2017. Cornelia figures in the Marsh Mud and Mummichog book. I relied on her account of how the island residents got lumber to build a church after the 1898 hurricane that hit the sea islands:
'On October 2, 1898, the strongest hurricane to hit the Georgia coast made landfall just south of Sapelo, on Cumberland Island. The storm surge in Brunswick was recorded at sixteen feet. The 1898 hurricane is part of the story tradition of the resident community on Sapelo, passed down from one generation to another. The brunt of the winds and high water fell full force on the island. Much of the land was underwater, and houses were washed away. People climbed the oak trees and tied themselves down to keep from drowning. At that time, there was a hospital on Blackbeard Island, just north of Sapelo, to quarantine and treat crews of ships infected with yellow fever, a cause of serious epidemics in the late 1800s. The hospital was completely destroyed in the hurricane. But not all was lost, as Cornelia Bailey relates in the book God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, a first-person account of growing up on Sapelo Island. She tells how the big storm aided the construction of a community church among a cluster of houses known as Raccoon Bluff on the north end of Sapelo, facing Blackbeard Island: "High winds tore the hospital apart and sent the lumber from it floating over toward the Bluff. The people at the Bluff asked permission to get the lumber and then they rowed out and gathered it up and they built themselves a new church. And that's how the church came to be located at the Bluff."'
Here is a link to a short video about Cornelia's effort to turn sea island red peas into a cash crop on Sapelo:
https://vimeo.com/72220517
photo - A bag of Geechee red peas grown on Sapelo Island.