Saturday, September 11, 2010

Little known facts Mitchelville

"One of the places they settled was Mitchelville, established by Maj. Gen. Ormsby M. Mitchel. He set aside about 1,000 acres, and in 1863 started selling it off. It went for about $1 an acre. People saved money to buy land because they knew land meant freedom," explains Campbell as he drives his small bus toward Mitchelville. This was the country's first settlement of Freedmen (former black slaves), and its founding came before President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Residents elected their own officials. The town council passed laws, including the state's first compulsory-education law.




The U.S. government abandoned this fledgling community in 1868 because President Andrew Johnson was "very sympathetic with the Confederates," Campbell says.



After the Civil War, many former slaves remained on Hilton Head and on other South Carolina islands, such as Johns and Daufuskie, and Georgia 's Sapelo, Harris Neck and Cumberland . They fished and farmed. They operated sugarcane mills and gristmills. They grazed their livestock and hunted on the open, common land.

Burnside Barrier Island

The barrier island of Burnside was a cool waterfront summer retreat for the Mercers. Now closed, the little yellow Allison’s store at Ferguson and Shipyard was a place where Johnny enjoying having a cold soda and visiting with friends during his summers on the island. Amanda Drive is named for his daughter and Hunt Drive for the banker who administered Johnny’s settlement of his father’s financial troubles.

Mercer’s summers were spent at the family’s summer home at Vernon View, a section of Burnside Island that was purchased by Johnny Mercer’s father around the time of the younger Mercer’s birth.

Johnny would go down from the family’s river home at Vernon View to the Pin Point Brand Oysters cannery (now A.S. Varn & Company) to listen to the African-American ladies singing gospel, spirituals and folk tunes in their Geechee dialect as they worked. The area of the family’s  riverfront summer home is not available to the public.

Pin Point & Oysters

Johnny Mercer learned many life lessons during his childhood visits to Pin Point, near his family’s Vernon View home. Pin Point is a little fishing village along an estuary south of Savannah , near the Bethesda orphanage. Freed slaves founded the rural settlement after the American Civil War.

It is one mile wide and a mile and a half long, and has been accessible by paved roads for some years. The small, predominantly African-American community has a well-established community of Gullah speakers, a dialect that draws heavily from West African languages.

The crab pickers in the Pin Point community will treat Savannah schoolchildren to a videotaped storytelling and impromptu a capella folk singing.