Imagine if you and your family were dropped off in the woods in South
Georgia with no house, no air conditioning, no insect repellant. You'd
begin to understand what life was like for the colonists who arrived here with
James Oglethorpe in 1733.
This is a, an 18th century style forge.
At high temperature, the steel is more plastic.
And you can take it, and move it, and form things out of it.
For the first colonists, nothing was easy. Building a house, making a fire, repairing
a broken tool, that all had to be done by hand. At Wormsloe plantation in Savannah,
every year people recreate the lives of Georgia's first settlers. They used the
same tools. They wear the same clothes.
I'm wearing, I've got a chamois on, which was
kind of like a slip today. It's the undergarment. Over that, I have a petticoat
and then my pockets. The pockets were hung from the women's side rather than
having pockets sewn into the clothing. Over that I have my bodice and then my
apron and then a mop cap on my top. It was it was considered indecent for a
lady to go out without a mop cap on.
And they do the same work colonists had
to do if they wanted to survive.
*Gun shot*
Making shingles and I've got a block of Cypress
here and I'm splitting them with a fro. We can put them on the roof like this, take another
one and lay it over the joint like that and nailing them and get a watertight roof.
The little structure we have over here has about a thousand shingles on it
and it's 16 by 12.
The cooking would have taken place outside in an open fire like
we have here today and then during the wintertime the cooking would have moved
inside to the fireplace.
This is a fire-making kit. I keep all the tools in
there to make the fire. It's simply a small tin. The things you need to make
fire are a flint, a carbon piece of steel, carbon steel, char cloth, and some tinder.
But the way the thing works is the char cloth catches the spark and holds it and
then you blow on it to get it going good in a little nest of the Spanish moss
that's been dried out and it's local.
*Background Adventure Music*
That's fire.
Even though it was only a few miles outside of Savannah,
Wormsloe plantation was the wilderness, the wild frontier. The colonists who
lived here were always afraid of being attacked by the Native Americans or the
Spanish so every farm had to be defended.
It is called a flintlock gun. The gun is
called a flintlock because there is a piece of stone here, flint like that
which is used to make arrowheads. And the Flint hits the frizzen here, which is a
piece of hardened steel, that creates a spark that goes into the pan here. I'm
going to take the cartridge out, open, and then I'm going to prime a little bit
here in the pan, shut that, and put the rest down the barrel, tamp it down and
then I'm ready to shoot.
*Gun Shot*
*Boom*
For the colonists throwing axes was more than a
game. It gave them the skill they needed to survive.
And the more you practiced
with this type of thing here, the better your chances of hitting an Indian or
something else in the wild that you would need to. That could mean the
difference between life and death or having a dinner and not.
Before James Oglethorpe ever set foot in Georgia, he described it as a near
paradise. He wrote the air is healthy being always serene. Pleasant and
temperate. Never subject to excessive heat or cold nor to sudden changes.
Others described it as the most delightful country in the universe with
mild temperatures and rich soil.
A great, great advertising campaign you know. Yeah,
you know the land of milk and honey. Why you don't have to farm you know things
are just growing right on the trees. And he's good and we're not exactly true if
you walked around here you know you go out there and try to find something to
eat right now, and well you might find an acorn or something.
It won't be very tasty.
Remember what they told us? How wonderful the land was, the most
delightful country in the universe, and the Indians begging for the gospel? Then
I just don't know how people back then dealt with the insects. If you've been
down here on coastal Georgia when the gnats come out and these are the biting
gnats out here and sand flies and large quantities of mosquitoes.
It was horrible at times.
It wasn't just the the adversaries of the Spanish that
the colonists were up against, or the or the Spanish and the French, they were up
against the climate and they were up against the the geography itself. They
probably were many many more people lost to disease than were ever lost to the
Spanish or the Indians.
The first colonists faced endless days of hard
work and bad water. They endured heat and mosquitoes and malaria. Of the 114 people
who landed with Oglethorpe in 1733, nearly 40 of them, or one in three, died
within the first year.
*End Screen Music*