The annual celebration and commemoration of a Liberty County native’s fight for freedom is coming to where she made her escape from slavery.
The Susie King Taylor annual Escape to Freedom celebration will be held April 13 at Jones Creek Park, with events starting at 3 p.m. at the Isle of Wight spot.
Taylor , recently honored with the naming of a Savannah square, the first in that city’s history to be named for a woman and someone who is Black, was born into slavery on the Gress plantation in 1848. The plantation, which Taylor called Gress Farm, was on the Isle of Wight.
“Typically, every year, we celebrate her escape to freedom,” said Dr. Hermina Glass-Hill, the director of the Susie King Taylor Institute.
When Glass-Hill moved to Liberty County from the metro Atlanta area seven years ago, there was an annual conference held on the date of Taylor’s birth, August 3.
“After COVID, we decided to change things around,” Glass-Hill said. “We’re meeting at Jones Creek because Gress River is included there. That’s would have been where she escaped from.”
Two days after Union forces won the siege at Fort Pulaski, Taylor and her uncle and some others slipped away and made their way to St. Catherine’s Island, where they were found by other Union soldiers.
After the Civil War, Taylor returned to Liberty County to open her second school, under the sponsorship of the Freedmen’s Bureau, on land once belonging to her former enslaver. She later opened a third school in Savannah, but it found competition from the free Beach Institute. Taylor was charging $1 a month, and the Beach Institute also held classed at night.
Taylor closed that school and went into domestic work. She landed a position at the home of Charles Green, working in the same home where Gen. William Sherman met with 20 Black ministers following Savannah’s capture by Union forces. It is now the historic Green-Meldrim House.
Glass-Hill surmises Taylor accompanied the Greens on their trips north and along the way experienced an enlightenment.
Glass-Hill had been hired in 2009 as the associate director at the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University. Her instructions were to find the stories she wanted to tell. It was then she came across the story of Susie Baker King Taylor, the only Black women to write a memoir of the Civil War.
The lecturer and author had a family history of ancestors serving in the U.S. Colored Troops, and about 180,000 Black men served in the Union during the Civil War.
“That’s when I discovered Susie King Taylor,” Glass-Hill said. “It has been challenging to get people to recognize her significance in American history, and she is from this town.”
The April 13 event will celebrate a hometown “shero,” with speakers and entertainment at the Jones Creek Park.
“We hope to continue what the Susie King Taylor Institute for Women has been doing for seven years,” Glass-Hill said, “and we hope it continues to grow.”