Georgia has a ferry-only island older than Egypt’s pyramids and even locals have no idea

It’s only a ferry ride away

Sapelo Island sits about 60 miles south of Savannah, a 12-mile-long barrier island you can only reach by boat.

A 30-minute ferry ride through salt marshes and tidal creeks drops you on a place with no chain stores, no traffic lights, and no crowds.

The state of Georgia owns about 97 percent of the land here, and McIntosh County claims it as the fourth-largest barrier island on the coast.

What you find when you step off that ferry goes back thousands of years, and the people who live here carry a story you won’t hear anywhere else.

Five flags flew over this island before Georgia got it

Native Americans lived on Sapelo as far back as 4,500 years ago.

Spanish, English and French settlers each took their turn after that, and in 1802, American planter Thomas Spalding bought the south end. He built a manor from tabby, a mix of lime, crushed oyster shells and water.

Among the people Spalding enslaved was Bilali Muhammad, a West African scholar who ran the day-to-day operations of the estate. Automotive pioneer Howard Coffin bought most of the island in 1912.

Tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds Jr. took over in 1934, and his widow later sold it to Georgia for a fraction of its value.

Walk among 4,000-year-old oyster shell rings

Three massive circular mounds sit on Sapelo, built from layers of oyster shells, clam shells and animal bones. The largest one stretches about 255 feet across and rises roughly 20 feet above the surrounding marsh.

Radiocarbon dating puts the site at around 2170 B.C., which makes it older than many of Egypt’s pyramids.

Researchers think Native Americans lived in circular villages and tossed shells behind their homes over generations.

The result is the oldest known Native American archaeological site in Georgia.

Climb 77 steps inside a lighthouse from 1820

Winslow Lewis built the Sapelo Island Lighthouse in 1820 on the island’s southern tip.

It stands 65 feet tall, making it the nation’s second-oldest brick lighthouse and the oldest surviving one Lewis designed. The brick walls run several feet thick at the base and taper to about two feet at the top.

The light went dark in the early 1900s, and the tower sat empty for nearly a century before a 1998 restoration brought it back.

Today, six red and white stripes match its original 1890s look, and a rebuilt spiral staircase takes you to the top for views over Doboy Sound.

Hog Hammock is the last of its kind on Earth

A few dozen people live in Hog Hammock, and they are the only documented intact Saltwater Geechee community still in existence. Their ancestors came from West Africa in the 1700s and 1800s.

The entire 427-acre community earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

Residents still speak the Gullah-Geechee dialect, weave sweetgrass baskets, fish with cast nets and practice herbal medicine. Hog Hammock falls within the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which runs from Wilmington, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla.

Learn to weave a sweetgrass basket by hand

Sweetgrass basket weaving goes back to the first West African ancestors who arrived on Sapelo. Weavers use saw palmetto and sweetgrass from the island, following techniques handed down through generations.

Master basket maker Yvonne Grovner won the 2020 Governor’s Award in the Arts and Humanities for keeping the craft alive. You can arrange a weaving demonstration by appointment and watch the whole process up close.

Other traditions carry on too, from seine net fishing and smoked mullet to the ring shout, a form of worship rooted in West African spiritual practices.

Presidents slept in the tabby mansion by the oaks

Thomas Spalding built the original tabby manor around 1810.

Howard Coffin restored and expanded it in the 1910s, and R.J. Reynolds Jr. did the same in the 1930s and 1940s. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover and aviator Charles Lindbergh all stayed here as guests.

Georgia State Parks runs the mansion now, and inside you’ll find a library stocked with books from Reynolds’ private collection and a billiards room.

Massive live oaks draped in Spanish moss shade the grounds, and pathways lead to the Atlantic, where a beachfront pavilion looks out over the shore.

Two beaches with no buildings and no crowds

Nanny Goat Beach sits on the eastern shore and holds the most extensive undisturbed natural dunes along the Georgia coast. The sand is soft and white, and you can pick up sand dollars and whelk shells as you walk.

A wooden boardwalk and a pavilion with picnic tables are the only structures out there.

On the island’s northern end, Cabretta Beach faces neighboring Blackbeard Island, and sun-bleached driftwood rises from the sand in dramatic tangles. Neither beach has a single commercial building on it.

Alligators, eagles and a Mexican bird that never left

The island’s mix of maritime forest, salt marsh, dunes and tidal creeks keeps a wide range of animals close.

You might spot American alligators, white-tailed deer, raccoons, armadillos, wild turkeys and feral pigs on any given walk.

Birdlife runs deep here, with ospreys, bald eagles, brown pelicans and gannets among the species you can see year-round. In 1923, Howard Coffin brought in chachalacas, a chicken-like game bird from Mexico.

About 30 to 40 of them still roam the island today.

Graves hold personal belongings left by the living

Behavior Cemetery is a post-Civil War African American burial ground on the island’s south end, about a mile west of Hog Hammock.

Gullah-Geechee tradition calls for placing personal belongings of the deceased on their graves, and a chain-link fence now protects those items from looting. Two historic churches still hold services in the community.

First African Baptist Church dates to 1866, and St. Luke Baptist Church opened in 1885. The Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society, a nonprofit founded in 1993, works to keep this heritage alive.

A salt marsh paper changed science worldwide

The Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve is a state-federal partnership between Georgia DNR and NOAA that protects the island’s western marshlands.

The University of Georgia Marine Institute has worked on 1,500 acres at the south end since the 1950s, when R.J. Reynolds funded the early research.

Ecologist Eugene Odum published his groundbreaking 1958 paper on salt marsh ecology here, and it helped show the world why wetlands matter.

Sapelo’s tidal marshes cycle twice daily, with about seven feet between low and high tide.

Explore Sapelo Island in coastal Georgia

If you want to see where 4,500 years of history sit on one island, head to the Sapelo Island Visitors Center at 1766 Landing Road SE in Meridian, Georgia.

The center is open Tuesday through Saturday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The ferry leaves from the Sapelo Island Visitors Center in Meridian, about eight miles northeast of Darien off Highway 99.

Ferry tickets run $1 for adults and 50 cents for children under 6, but you’ll need to book a guided tour in advance through Georgia DNR.

Tours fill up, so plan ahead and check the official website for current schedules and availability.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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