Approximately 15 miles northeast of Kingsland lies a street in St. Mary’s called Elliott’s Bluff Rd. The road near Crooked Street State Park is named in honor of the African-American settlement established there during Reconstruction. The Elliott’s Bluff settlement was a haven for recently emancipated families creating a new life of freedom. Many prominent African-American Camden families once lived and thrived there. One family in particular, the Wilsons, was instrumental in its founding, producing two political leaders whose representation impacted the African-American political history of the state.
During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people sought opportunities to carve out their new existence while facing many hardships. In the aftermath of the war, land in St. Mary’s and the rest of low country Georgia had either been captured by General Sherman’s Army or abandoned by their owners. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 designated roughly 625 miles of land stretching from coastal South Carolina to north Florida (often dubbed Sherman’s Reservation) for recently liberated African Americans to establish settlements. According to an 1866 deed, three men (Fergus Wilson, Charles Orme, and George Crabtree) purchased 700 acres of land from the Freedmen’s Bureau with a $300 down payment and an agreement to pay the remaining $300 balance the following year. Many of the men in the colony worked in the local sawmills or as day laborers to earn wages to pay for the land. The ten families that settled in the area constructed an organized community, instituted laws, and selected leaders to oversee their administration. By the following year, the families had cultivated a large part of the land, clearing 100 acres and planting on 25 producing large amounts of corn, potatoes, peas, and fodder without the use of mules or oxen. In 1868, they built a school to educate the Elliott’s Bluff children, hiring Anthony Wilson as its first teacher.
Born in 1850, Anthony Wilson was the son of Fergus Wilson, one of the founders of Elliott’s Bluff Settlement. Little is known about his early life except for his work alongside the other men of the Settlement, helping to clear the 700 acres and earning wages to pay off the land purchase. It was during this time that he suffered a life-changing injury when he lost his hand during a sawmill incident. Unable to continue doing manual labor, the Freedmen’s Bureau hired him as the Settlement’s first teacher, earning $20 a month funded by the Bureau and the parents of Elliott’s Bluff. Sadly, the school closed within two years of opening because the parents were unable to support it financially. By 1880, Wilson had married and moved his family of six (his wife, Hester, and four children) to the Bailey’s Mill section of St. Mary’s (north of the Satilla River). Wilson remained active in the Elliott’s Bluff community, serving as the organizing pastor of Mush Bluff Baptist Church (now St. John’s Missionary Baptist) and as the supervisor of the turpentine leases established on Settlement property. Known as a farmer and school teacher, Wilson owned over 350 acres of land.
As one of the first African Americans to register to vote in 1867 with the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, Wilson was very politically minded. He ran for Camden County Representative in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1882, 1884, 1886, and 1892, winning each of these elections. An 1885 Savannah Morning News article described him as “well-to-do, industrious and sober” alongside his brother Hercules Wilson, who represented McIntosh County in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1882-1885. As a State Representative, Anthony Wilson served on the Education Committee and attempted to improve the lives of African Americans through new legislation, including proposing a technology school branch for Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) and banning discrimination in public accommodations; both bills failed to pass. During his service, he succeeded in passing two bills: one that changed the court session dates of the Camden County Superior Court and another that set a deadline for introducing bills before the legislature. As a community leader, he and educator Matilda Harris started the annual New Year’s Day celebration in Kingsland, which featured daytime parades and cookouts.
References
Bell, Karen Cook. Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017.
Grant D. L. & Grant J. (20011993). The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia. University of Georgia Press. Retrieved October 31, 2023 from https://archive.org/details/wayitwasinsouthb0000gran.
History.com Editors. (2021, March 2). Freedmen’s Bureau Created. History. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/freedmans-bureau-created
Myers, B. (2020, September 30). Sherman’s Field Order No. 15. New Georgia Encyclopedia. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15/
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. (2018). Forty Acres and a Mule. Teachinghistory.org. https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24170#:~:text=The%20purpose%20of%20Sherman’s%20order,as%20the%20%E2%80%9CSherman%20Reservation.%E2%80%9D&text=Sherman%20had%20defined%20a%20general,his%20wording%20was%20somewhat%20ambiguous.
Savannah Morning News. (1885, October 3). Georgia’s Negro Legislators. Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/article/savannah-morning-news-georgias-negro-le/105882728/
Stevens, Mary Jane (December 1973). Some Aspects of Negro Life in Camden County, Georgia,1868-1906 (https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/cau.td%3A1973_stevens_mary_j/datastream/OBJ/) (MA). Atlanta University. Retrieved 2023-04-02
Thompson, E. B. (2008). In Wandering in Camden: Historical Sketches of Camden County, Georgia and Beyond (pp. 165-166; – 264). essay, River City Printing.
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, March 18). Anthony Wilson (American Politician). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Wilson_(American_politician)
