The National Wildlife Refuge System is the world's premiere system of public lands and
waters, set aside to conserve America's fish, wildlife and plants.
In the southeast alone there are 128 protected wildlife refuges.
The Okefenokee Swamp is one of these special places.
But things were not always so.
"Swampers," as they were called, were people who settled and made their homes in and around
the edges of the swamp.
William T. Chesser killed a man, a surveyor, over some land dealings, and he didn't wait
around for any investigation, he just ran.
There was a brother down here already and he came and joined him.
I don't know how he found out he was cleared of charges but he went back and got his family
because he just liked the area so much.
And that's when they came here in 1858.
In the late 1800's, WT Chesser and his family settled a small island on the eastern edge
of the Okefenokee.
Tom and Ida Chesser are the ones that built this particular house.
It's a five-bedroom house, it's a big house for that time era.
All the lumber was sawed here on the island.
Uncle Tom brought a saw mill out here and they cut the trees, sawed them, and they paid
a man $2 a day to help them deal with the house.
While exploring the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, visitors can experience how these
people lived by touring the Chesser Island Homestead.
The only thing they bought from town when they went to town, which wasn't but two or
three times a year, was their gunpowder for their gun and sugar and salt and flour.
Then the material of the flour sacks is what they made a lot of their clothes with.
They were self-sufficient people.
They kept the yards clean like this on account of fires, snakes and insects.
Back then if you had grass in the yard you were considered lazy white people.
They did have a few rose bushes around… there was a garden.
That was their main thing, what they tended to more than anything because they raised
their own food, they had cows, chickens, hogs, so they had milk, they had eggs.
The garden stuff, they had peas, butterbeans, corn, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes…
they eat quite well.
All these pine trees back here behind, that was a field back then and they planted these
pines I believe in '58.
But that was all field, that's where they had their garden.
They also had about 1/2 acre of peaches.
Another cash crop was the turpentine from the pine trees.
Then they also had cane syrup, they grew a lot of cane.
They did have other contact.
The church.
They would go to Sardis Primitive Baptist Church.
We call them "hardshell."
And that was once a month, and they would go from here, and they would leave on Saturday
morning and go stay with some relatives that night and they would have church Saturday,
kind of a meeting more or less, and then Sunday would be the main preacher.
A lot of us volunteer, we'll come out for the festival and cook on the wood stove.
We serve a sample of bacon, ham, sausage and biscuits.
We make fried sweet taters and just try to give you a sample of what they ate back in
their day.
We'll make a pumpkin pie, serve a little bit of that.
We sign four note quite a lot… we'll sing that at the festival.