Sites of Killing and Oppression

Wednesday, March 23rd – St. Augustine, Florida to Savannah, Georgia – Day 44 

 We woke up on the golf course. The person beside us had been running their generator all night so Gen and Mary were tired. I’m not sure the rest of us were bothered that much. I found a mechanic that was able to do an oil change and Mary very helpfully took the car over to get it done. We have travelled about 8000 km on the trip so far and it was overdue. We packed up because we didn’t feel like hanging out in a parking lot; even though, directly beside the parking lot, there was a play structure the kids enjoyed. 

 We had a 3-hour drive to Savannah but before we could cross the border we wanted to squeeze in another national park, Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve. Unfortunately, I put in the wrong area of the park, so we ended up at Fort Caroline. It turned out well since Fort Caroline had their own badge. 

We got the junior ranger sheets and then walked to the Fort. Apparently, there was a French settlement here and the Spanish colonists from Florida came and massacred them. The Timucuan were a people who lived in the area when the French settled and granted permission for the French to use the land. The Timucuan no longer exist.

 We walked around the fort and the surrounding saltwater marsh. We needed to find some animals for the junior ranger program in the marsh. In the ditch there were dozens of these little crabs that were moving around. They were the size of a toonie and cute. Once we drew them in our package, we went on a 2 km nature walk. It was a beautiful, shady forest walk through oaks covered in Spanish moss. In the visitor centre, the kids finished their packages, and the kids were sworn in again as junior rangers. 

 The ranger informed us that the actual centre of the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve was 30 minutes away and was focused life on a plantation during slave times (and they had another badge). Off we went. The plantation was on the water down a long dirt road. 

The plantation itself consisted of the owner’s home with a kitchen attached, shed and stables and slave cabins. There was also a visitor’s centre where Aisling and Charlotte were given the opportunity to remove the cotton from a cotton pod. They had to pick out the seeds and remove dirt and the leaves from the cotton while watching out for the sharp points of the pod casing. The park had an excellent audio tour that focused on the lives of the slaves who lived there. 

The interesting part of the plantation was the owner, he believed in being a benevolent slave owner. He thought that slaves were people and were due a degree of independence. He allowed them to work for themselves on their own time to make money since a slave that had the opportunity to work for themselves was less likely to rebel. His four wives were all African and he had to move to Haiti, the only free black colony, when the laws changed to take away the rights of black people (up to that point, slavery was illegal but the law was not enforced in Georgia). 

 We visited the barn and the main house and talked to the girls about slavery. At this point, it started to rain and the kids had finished their activity packages, so we went back to the visitor centre to be sworn in as junior rangers again. On our way out we walked through the slave cabins. They were made of Tabby concrete, a mixture of sea shells, ash, sand and water. They each had two rooms and a fireplace and were apparently bigger then many other slave quarters. 

 On our way to Savannah we stopped at a small restaurant that Gen had found off a highway exit. The kids got massive chicken finger kid’s meals and the adults all got the $12 steak special. It was delicious and super cheap. Although every meal, even cheap ones, costs $40-60 which is actually $55-75 Canadian so we are really trying not to eat out. I really love eating out though.