By Chuck Mobley
Coastal Senior

Butler Island blends in with the marsh scenery along Interstate 95. Blink and you're past what used to be one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the Antebellum South.

Now a bird habitation, it used to be a storied plantation.

An 1828 visitor to the area wrote, "In coming from Hopeton to Darien, we stopped at Butler's Island, the most valuable plantation on this river. We walked across the island on which there is the greatest number of oranges, sour oranges that I have ever seen. There are also lemon trees in abundance & sweet orange trees ... "

That was the seemingly tidy world of Pierce Butler, who along with neighbors like the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones and James Hamilton Couper controlled thousands of slaves and miles of property.

Coastal Georgia historian Buddy Sullivan has brought that era back through the eyes of one of its most prominent players - planter and plantation owner Roswell King Jr.

The author of several books, including "History of Georgia, 1733-2000," "Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater, The Story of McIntosh County and Sapelo" and "From Beautiful Zion to Red Bird Creek, A History of Bryan County, Georgia," Sullivan admirably serves this time as the editor of King's 1845 to 1854 agricultural journal.

King is important as a Liberty County planter - he owned South Hampton and Woodville plantations: and as manager - he ran Butler Island's rice operation and a St. Simons Island cotton plantation for the Butler family.

Sullivan goes to great pains to place King and his attendant duties in the proper context.

His 35-page introduction is a masterful overview of the principles and perils of plantation management.

It's also a painfully honest portrayal of plantation slavery.

"When I pass sentence myself, various modes of punishment are adopted, the lash least of all," King wrote in an 1828 article in the "Southern Agriculturist." That pious tone, however, was only part of the picture.

King was in the habit of using selected Butler slaves for sexual pleasure. "By the time of his marriage to Julia Maxwell in 1825," Sullivan explains, "(King) had fathered a number of mulatto children by the women of the Butler plantations."

This boiling pot of miscegenation spilled over during the 1839 visit of Pierce Butler's wife, Fanny Kemble. A native of England and a Shakespearean actress of great renown, Kemble was a rare 19th-century figure - a woman with a voice. What she saw on Butler Island angered her to the core.

"It shocked her to discover ... that Mr. King's features could be traced in several of the young mulatto faces on the Butler estates," goes a quote that Sullivan takes from one of Kemble's biographers.

Her shock and anger with Butler, King and slavery were loudly voiced in her "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39." This 1863 publication is sometimes credited with keeping Britain out of the Civil War.

After the war, the Butler family was unable to keep the island going as a private venture.

Ironically, what once made Butler Island stand out the most - its slaves and its fields - led to its present state.