AN ECCENTRIC PLACE OF VERY HIGH QUALITY: OSSABAW ISLAND, GEORGIA AS A CONTEXT FOR THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORICAL, CULTURAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE ON THE ATLANTIC COAST by LINDA ORR KING Under the Direction of Glenn T. Eskew, PhD ABSTRACT This sweeping narrative demonstrates how Ossabaw Island’s landowners, some with a dedicated will and others unwittingly, managed to galvanize social, cultural, scientific, and political forces to preserve its natural environment despite a culture motivated by profit. Although geographically isolated, Ossabaw Island’s owners and inhabitants were active participants within the Atlantic World. Ossabaw’s owners and inhabitants adapted environmental strategies and social ideologies in accommodation not only with Ossabaw’s fragile barrier island ecosystems, but also with Southeastern coastal Georgia’s social and political movements. In particular, this work examines how the advantages of wealth and privilege provided the catalyst that ultimately benefited rather than exploited social and economic conditions on the island, leading Ossabaw Island to become the first barrier island Heritage Preserve on the southern Atlantic Coast. In addition to an analysis of unpublished manuscripts, maps, correspondence, and oral histories, this endeavor expands on the current knowledge about barrier island planters, slaves, freedmen, tenant farmers, lumbermen, boatmen, industrialists, and privileged families. It builds on previous works by including the guests, artists, scientists, writers, and environmentalists who visited the island. Furthermore, it investigates their interaction within political, economic, cultural, religious, and ideological spheres. Ossabaw Island’s indigenous societies, landed gentry, and wealthy owners shaped its cultural and economic identity from the 1560s to the modern day. It analyzes additional materials, including colonial and plantation records, official and personal correspondence, travel narratives, newspaper and magazine articles, and oral histories. This study seeks to expand the discourse on the exchange of sea island economies and societies well beyond the Savannah coastal region of the Atlantic World. The Ossabaw community evolved through conflict and compromise, and eventually encompassed not only sons and daughters of privilege and descendants of former slaves, but also artists, writers, scientists, and scholars from around the world. The central theme of this narrative history is the study of the motivating forces, both natural and synthetic, that shaped Ossabaw Island’s current distinctive cultural, environmental, and educational mission, with the major emphasis placed on the events of the 20th and 21st centuries.