Pin Point is a small but vibrant community located a few miles south of Savannah. It was a place founded in 1896 by freed slaves after the American Civil War, They came from Ossabaw, Green, and Skidaway Islands. Oh the hopes, joy and dreams that must have been present at its beginning. They had nothing and yet they had one thing they had for so long prayed: freedom. Their sweat would now be for their families, fortune, and future. A church once named Hinder Me Not came to be founded in Pin Point. But they were freedmen now and the name did not seem appropriate anymore. So in 1897 they founded Sweetfield of Eden Baptist Church. The legendary Moon River runs by the community. The land is graced with beautiful oak trees and coastal marshes. Many a painter would ennoble their canvases of the lands found around the Sweetfields that grew the crops they ate. It was no longer a bitter land. It was a land that had the primal look of an Eden.

 

The church was used as the school. Where once in Savannah it was illegal to educate their ancestors and they had met in back rooms, they now taught their children in the open. In 1926, a Rosenwald School opened. These were schools Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute and Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck built to improve the segregated school crumbs Jim Crow allowed. The Rosenwald were state-of-the art schools for African-American children across the South. The effort has been called the most important initiative to advance black education in the early 20th century. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was born and raised in Pin Point, would be one of the beneficiaries of this new school.

 

In 1925, a plot of land was purchased by the Brotherhood of Friendship Society to house a community center, named Pin Point Hall. Many residents still consider the center to be the glue that holds the community together. The Brotherhood itself continues to be an influential group in Pin Point. Because they knew labor and were proud to work and earn a fair wage, industry came to Pin Point. Coastal Industries such as shrimping, crabbing, and oyster harvesting came. Seafood factories opened with the most prominent being A. S. Varn and Sons which operated from 1926 to 1985. They were the perfectors of ‘making do’ with what they had. So life was filled with good things and they had the satisfaction of knowing how to be self-sufficient.

 

The community of African Americans brought with them the heritage of the Gullah/Geechee cultures. For over 100 years they were isolated in their own world. Today, they are bearing witness to a simpler time and a heritage of the Gullah/Geechee culture that many say is the closest unvarnished lineage of their African ancestors. The Pin Point Heritage Museum is located in the old A.S. Varn & Son Oyster and Crab Factory. Next to the church is the area’s original cemetery, housing the remains of Pin Point’s founding African American owners. The history found in this one small community is astounding!

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The Pin Point community is still owned by the ancestors of the original purchasers, making it the largest area of waterfront owned by African Americans in Georgia. The stories in part can be found in the museum but the volumes that could be written of this community that did overcome would be endless. Pin Point, alive as it ever was, today stands as testament to a people who kept their hearts, heritage, and hearth close to their bosom.