159 years ago, the town of Darien, Georgia, was burned by the 2nd SC volunteers and the 54th Massachusetts. 150 years later, we opened up a museum to tell their stories, such as including Colonel James Montgomery’s order for them to burn the town. It wasn’t until the 1989 movie Glory that honor was shown to the 54th Mass for their bravery. We are still waiting for that honor for the 2nd SC, whose previous mission was the successful Combahee Raid with Harriet Tubman.

For 150 years, Elizabeth Garey’s story was buried in the files of the Southern Claims Commission. A friend found the document mentioned on a blog, and transcribed the entire record for us. We decided to honor her with an entire exhibit. We were amazed at the details of her story. She was a Biracial Free Person of Color fathered by a white man and a woman of African descent. We don’t know if her mother was at one time enslaved, but we know her father enslaved her grandmother. She was living with her husband William, also a Biracial Free Person of Color, and their children in a property on First Street in Darien, inherited from her father, who was a former mayor and in his 1827 will left an inheritance to her mother Mary and her brothers, although her father’s relatives protested this for over 50 years. Her sons William, Andrew and Charles left with the 2nd SC and 54th Mass that day, becoming USCT soldiers. She followed her sons to camp in Beaufort after her home and town were burned, and then saved the life of Susie King Taylor. This led us on a 9 year journey of researching their lives, their friends, their stories. We found her descendants and connected them to her story. They even visited us several times at the museum traveling from Virginia.

And now her story is being silenced again. The Darien City Council has taken our keys and changed the locks starting in November 2021. After a promise to send us a lease (over the following several months), we were ignored, disparaged, and then informed that no lease would be coming and the building was being given to another organization. We operated with no issues for almost 9 years in a building for which the city had little use. We shared it with the Downtown Development Authority who were upstairs and had a single part time employee. The last vacancy of that position was for over 2 years.

Now, we leave and not willingly, but we can’t handle any more discrimination. We leave not only as the only museum in town that tells the story of the African-American experience from enslavement to present, but with heavy hearts because our work for the last 9 years is being disparaged and disregarded.

We need a new building in town, where we are free to tell of our shared histories, good and bad. We need to continue to connect the hundreds of people who came to our volunteer operated museum to connect with their ancestors, to see their faces, to learn their names. We often would drive or take them to where their ancestors lived so they could stand in those spaces; whether it’s Sapelo, Harris Neck, Carneghan, Hird Island, or Butler Island. Though this will be extremely challenging to our work this won’t silence us. We will continue our work. We will always tell their stories and say their names.

Our 160th anniversary is in exactly one year. If there’s anything we learned from our last 9 years, it’s to be brave, and stand up, even when others do not. We WILL operate our museum again.

Thank You to descendants like Elizabeth Garey for including us in her story. We won’t let her story, and others like hers, be hidden again for another 150 years. We won’t let your stories not be told. The stories of many of you right here in Darien and McIntosh County. The stories of Sapelo, of Harris Neck, of Howfyl, of Butler, of all of those places exist right there in our museum. So when they shut our doors they shut the doors on all of those stories too. We must work together to not let that happen. We will rise from the ashes. We will overcome this.