Inside the Struggle to Preserve Georgia's Butler Island, Home to a Notorious Plantation

Photographs by Sheila Pree Bright Text by Melissa L. Cooper The route that runs straight through Darien, Georgia, and cuts across the marshes, rivers and creeks along coastal McIntosh County leads to a historic site: Butler Island, a once vast antebellum plantation. Drivers unfamiliar with this stretch of U.S. Highway 17 likely pay little attention to the remains of a 75-foot brick chimney that powered the old…