Evenings with History highlights legacy of Sapelo Island

For the second Evenings with History, Georgia’s Old Capital Heritage Center at the Depot, Inc. (GOCHC) hosted T.M. “Mike” Brown, author of The Last Laird of Sapelo.

Brown is a Georgia author and a former teacher, coach, and more.

He retired in 2014 and was encouraged by his wife to begin writing stories for their grandchildren to read. Through his writing journey, Brown sought the assistance of a writing coach who eventually became his editor. He would go on to publish the Shiloh mystery series and then The Last Laird of Sapelo this past August.

The Last Laird of Sapelo is a historical fiction story about Randolph Spaulding, the youngest son of the Spaulding family of Sapelo Island.

It explores his interactions with families from Charleston to Savannah to Milledgeville and his failure to thwart Georgia’s decision to secede from the Union in 1861.

However, for Brown’s talk, he spoke more on the backstory leading up to the book and the Spaulding legacy as a whole. 

According to Brown, Thomas Spaulding, Randolph’s father, was the primary onlooker over Randolph’s shoulder and the one who left the expectations and beliefs that Randolph tried to follow.

“He (Thomas) was the Benjamin Franklin of Georgia at the time,” said Brown.

Thomas and his wife had the means to buy Sapelo Island and were the first of the Spaulding family to own the land. They created a plantation on the south side of the island and created about 16 communities around the island for their workers and slaves to live near the fields and have their form of neighborhoods.

“He (Thomas) was one of the most progressive agriculturists in early America,” said Brown. “He devised new ways to blend crops and diversify crops. He sent out a warning to all the planters in the south that ‘If you only plant cotton, you will be ruined.’” 

This warning was due to how the cotton plant takes in nutrients from the soil and leads to an inevitable search for more land and locations to produce and more needed labor. So, on Sapelo, the Spaulding plantation had a range of crops beyond ‘Georgia’s Gold’ at the time.

According to Brown, Thomas’ perceptions of that time were also different about his workers and slaves. Brown stated that Thomas believed they were family and believed that “happy workers were a good thing.” 

When he did purchase slaves, Thomas always bought them as a family, and in 1810 he stopped buying slaves altogether. In addition, the overseer of his plantation was an enslaved Muslim man named Bilali Mohammed, who Brown states had a large impact on what occurred in Sapelo and the legacy of the Geechee.

His workers were only required to work for six hours a day for five days a week and, according to Brown, no records show any abuse or harm committed out of anger.

Brown would go on to highlight how Thomas promised his workers that they would never be sold off Sapelo as long as Thomas was alive and owned the land. Many years later, Randolph Spaulding would do his best to keep this promise when the Civil War was heading for the island.

Randolph moved his family and his workers together to keep them safe.

“The Last Laird of Sapelo is a historical fiction story revealing how our past legacy inescapably shapes who we are today. The characters in the story, both fictional and actual, play out their drama in this novel about McIntosh County’s storied Georgia coastal region, which to this day remains cursed by its past, according to many of their residents,” wrote Brown in his Southern Pondering and Historical Matters blog.

When answering questions after his talk, Brown explained that there are historical family ties within the story that connects Sapelo to Milledgeville and other cities. For example, one of Randolph’s sisters would marry a lieutenant from Milledgeville and spend much of the war in the city.

“I wrote The Last Laird of Sapelo because I wanted to highlight the history of Sapelo and bring attention to the legacy of the Geechee,” said Brown.

While he did dive into the story of Randolph, Brown laid out the exposition for Randolph’s beliefs and his upbringing that connect to how he would run Sapelo and how he treated the Geechee people as laird of the land they inhabited. To learn more about The Last Laird of Sapelo, visit tmbrownauthor.com.