Leaders of the Bulloch County Historical Society appeared near the stage on East Main Street at the start of the First Friday Ag Night Out on Oct. 7 for a public dedication of the society’s latest completed mural project, “River People.”
This anthropologically-themed artwork isn’t a single painting, but rather a set of five paintings, all on the west-facing wall of the Averitt Center for the Arts facility at 41 West Main St., which houses the Whitaker Black Box Theater and the Rosengart Gallery. The murals can be seen from the West Main-College Street intersection.
They depict different activities from the lives of Native Americans who inhabited the area, settling near the Ogeechee River and other streams, in prehistoric times.
The Historical Society commissioned professional mural artists David Boatwright and Michael Kuffel, both from Charleston, South Carolina, to paint the murals at the end of December 2021 and concluding in January 2022. Nearly two years earlier, Boatwright and Kuffel had realized the society’s previous large, single-panel mural, “The Fabulous Fifty of 1906,” facing the drive-thru side of Statesboro City Hall on East Main Street.
To complete this year’s project, the Bulloch County Historical Society had a plaque made by the company International Bronze affixed to the West Main wall, with text giving information on the Archaic Period people of the area.
Virginia Anne Franklin Waters, the Historical Society’s executive director, commented that holding the dedication ceremony on Ag Night Out, the Downtown Statesboro Development Authority’s annual salute to area agriculture, was fitting.
“I can’t think of a more appropriate time,” she said. “The river people were the first stewards of our land here in Bulloch County.”
She then read aloud the text of the plaque, beginning with the artists’ names and concluding with the notation that it, like many other BCHS projects, was funded by the Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Foundation. This one cost about $30,000.
The rest follows.
‘River People’
“This series of murals depicts important aspects of life in Bulloch County in the Late Archaic Period (ca. 3000-1000 BCE), one of the most interesting and active periods of local American Indian occupation. The environment of Bulloch County and south Georgia had become warmer and initially wetter with rich and diverse resources for hunter gatherers that supported larger populations than ever before. Thanks to the area’s abundance of fish and mussels from the rivers and creeks, as well as game and a wide variety of nuts, fruit, and edible plants from the woodlands surrounding them, indigenous populations were able to establish more permanent settlements along the Ogeechee River.
Among the most important of their food sources were freshwater mussels that were consumed in large amounts. The refuse shells were scattered throughout the village and disposed in large trash piles known as middens. These middens preserve a wide variety of discarded items that help archaeologists better understand and reconstruct the lives of these people.
From large pine and cypress trees, they constructed dugout canoes that helped them travel long distances, trading and establishing relationships with others.
This period saw the development of new tools and technologies such as large projectile points / knives, soapstone vessels, and clay pottery. People living along the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers at this time created the first and oldest documented pottery in North America, thousands of years before the intensive farming was common in Georgia.
Fish, turtles, and even alligators were captured in traps at points along the river, a practice that continued into the 19th century. In fact, much of the culture of later indigenous groups in the Southeast had their origins in the practices of the Late Archaic Period.
Special thanks to the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns and Georgia Southern University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology in guiding the accuracy and character of the murals.”