History of Silver Bluff Audubon Center and Sanctuary

Silver Bluff rests on the ancestral lands of the Yuchi (Euchee) people and later became an important gathering place for the Muscogee (Creek), who maintained strong cultural and diplomatic ties to this part of the Savannah River Valley. In the 1740s, Irish trader George Galphin established a major trading post here for commerce with neighboring Native Nations. The post later became a British fort during the Revolutionary War and, afterward, a plantation where hundreds of enslaved Africans were forced to live and labor.

Silver Bluff is also home to the Silver Bluff Baptist Church, founded around 1773 and recognized as one of the earliest African American congregations in the nation. Many of the people who built, worshiped at, and sustained that church—and whose hardship and perseverance shaped this land—are buried nearby at Colvin Cemetery, a sacred resting place honoring their lives, faith, and enduring legacy.

The land’s modern story began in 1966, when Floyd Starr, a Philadelphia conservationist and quail hunter, bequeathed more than 3,000 acres to the National Audubon Society to demonstrate that sustainable forestry and agriculture could coexist with wildlife conservation. The property became Silver Bluff Sanctuary in 1975, marking the beginning of nearly fifty years of ecological restoration, education, and community engagement.

Today and every day, we honor the resilience, innovation, and care of all who came before us and remain steadfast in our stewardship of this land—working to restore the native longleaf pine, wetland, and grassland ecosystems that flourished here centuries ago, and to preserve the wildlife and histories that connect Silver Bluff’s past and future.