Although today the site of recent suburban residential, retail, and recreational developments, the transitional area where mainland meets the marshes and tidal creeks south of Savannah has a long and rich history catering to individuals and groups at the lower end of the economic ladder—free African Americans at Sandfly and Pin Point and orphans at Bethesda. Yet the area was also home to communities of summer houses for wealthy Savannahians, including Vernonburg, Montgomery, and Beaulieu. The construction of the Diamond Causeway in 1971 connected the mainland to Skidaway Island, the largest island among the marshes east and south of Savannah, prompting the development of The Landings (19.8), the region’s first gated community.
Sandfly was established in the 1870s, when families of former slaves purchased property south of the Isle of Hope along the suburban railway lines which connected Savannah to its surrounding areas and encouraged development in the years after the Civil War. The community grew between the 1870s and the 1890s, and by 1900 many of the more than 300 residents were employed as carpenters, masons, bricklayers, seamstresses, and cobblers, working on or in many downtown buildings. Only a handful of sites testify to the heritage of a community whose descendants and buildings stem from some of the oldest families in Savannah. Suburban development and gentrification has disrupted most of the once-larger and vibrant African American community, despite efforts by a coalition of families to form the Sandfly Community Betterment Association. Although economic decline and pressure from development forced many residents to sell their land, a number of houses and families remain along Central Avenue, north of Montgomery Cross Road to Skidaway Road and south of Norwood Avenue.
The community of Pin Point, located eight miles south of downtown Savannah, is best known as the place where U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas lived until the age of six. The name Pin Point derives from the Chinquapin Point, a piece of land with a stand of chinquapin trees. The community was formerly a small part of the six-hundred-acre Beaulieu Plantation. The plantation’s lands were sold to Henry McAlpin, who subdivided most of them for affluent residences but allowed freedmen, such as Benjamin and William Bond and Benjamin Dillwood (who fled here after an 1893 hurricane devastated Ossabaw Island), to purchase the remaining property. Other freedmen came from Burnside, Green, and Skidaway Islands after the Civil War.
Guale Indians inhabited Skidaway Island and the surrounding coastal region for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Pottery, tools, and other implements, some dating back four thousand years, can be seen at the Skidaway Island State Park Interpretive Center. The island was one of the first settled by Europeans after the arrival of Oglethorpe in 1733, although the saline soil and lack of supplies made living here difficult. Beginning with statewide prohibition in 1908, the island—which was only accessible by boat until a bridge was built for new developments in 1971 —became a haven for moonshiners.
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