Carl Olaf Svendsen, Jr. was born in Brunswick in 1908, a year after his father, Carl Olaf Svendsen, Sr., became keeper of the St. Simons Lighthouse. The Keeper’s Dwelling at the base of the lighthouse was the boy’s home throughout his childhood.
While Carl Jr. often assisted his father with his keeper’s duties, he also spent time roaming and exploring the sparsely populated expanses of the island (the 1920 census listed just 727 residents) in search of artifacts from the island’s history.
Photo courtesy of Coastal Georgia Historical Society.
Projectile point artifacts from SSI
For thousands of years, Native Americans lived on St. Simons Island and found sustenance in the rich natural resources of the land, ocean and estuaries. They left behind evidence of how they lived in the enduring features they created, such as shell middens–the refuse piles created as the native people discarded oyster shells in the same areas over many generations. Also left behind were remnants of tools and hunting implements, including the points from knives, spears and arrows. Searching for these rare artifacts delighted young Carl.
In the 1990s, prior to his death, Carl, Jr. generously donated to the Coastal Georgia Historical Society a significant collection of the artifacts he recovered from his island explorations, including the projectile points and scraping tool shown on this page, which probably date from 3000 to 1000 B.C. Native American artifacts from his collection are on display in the Keeper’s Dwelling, which is now the St. Simons Lighthouse Museum.
This month’s image, from the Society’s archives, shows Carl Svendsen, Jr. on the steps of the Keeper’s Dwelling with his sister Happy, around 1922.
Photo courtesy of the Coastal Georgia Historical Society.
Carl Olaf Svendsen, Jr and Happy
Since its founding in 1965, Coastal Georgia Historical Society’s archival collection has grown to over 15,000 historically important artifacts, documents and photographs. The Society invites you to turn to this page each month in 2015 as our Anniversary year unfolds.
