The 2025 Brunswick Lecture Series features an exciting slate of four speakers, expanding beyond the Brunswick city limits and across several centuries of our area’s fascinating history.
Program Dates: Tuesdays, October 7, 14, 21, and 28 from 4pm – 5:30pm
Location: College of Coastal Georgia’s Stembler Theatre, located within the Campus Center (Click Here to View a Campus Map)
Tickets: Please click on the links below:
Full Series (4 Lectures): $40
Individual Tickets (1 Lecture): $20
https://www.coastalgeorgiahistory.org/date/2025-brunswick-lecture-series/
October 7: “The History of Butler Island and the Life of Frances Anne Kemble”
Presented by: Buddy Sullivan, the Coastal Georgia Historical Society’s Consulting Historian.
Mr. Sullivan will focus his program on the history of Butler Island and the life of Frances Anne Kemble, a 19th century Englishwoman who wrote and published a journal that influenced attitudes on slavery in both Britain and the United States. Kemble recorded her observations during the months spent on her husband Pierce M. Butler’s Altamaha River and St. Simons Island plantations in 1838 and 1839. Sullivan’s lecture will review the five generations of the Butler family that owned Butler Island and Hampton Plantation, with a particular focus on Kemble, her marriage to Pierce Butler, and their descendants.
October 14: “Brunswick’s New Deal”
Presented by: Hector Montford, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of History at the College of Coastal Georgia.
We welcome Dr. Montford back for the third year presenting a program for the Brunswick Lecture Series! His program will explore the array of New Deal projects and programs in Brunswick during the Great Depression. The presentation will also highlight the people involved with New Deal programs locally, and the lasting legacy of the projects in the community.
October 21: “Why Was the Oglethorpe Hotel Torn Down?”
Presented by: Josh Dukes, a member of the Brunswick Historic Preservation Board and co-author of the recent book Brunswick: Past & Present.
The program begins with the 188 unveiling of the Oglethorpe Hotel—an architectural masterpiece by J. A. Wood that became the city’s social and cultural centerpiece. For seven decades it welcomed guests in grand style, only to meet an unexpected and controversial end in 1958. This lecture explores the hotel’s celebrated past, the chain of events that sealed its fate, and how shifting tastes in design and development played their part. Mr. Dukes will uncover what became of the Oglethorpe’s leftovers, and celebrate the memories left behind when Brunswick’s most famous landmark vanished from the skyline.
October 28: “Story of Stories: The Brunswick Advocate and the Life of a City, 1837-1839″
Presented by: Allison Dupuis, CGHS’s Historian.
Ms. Dupuis will explore 1830s Brunswick through the lens of this vital but short-lived newspaper. When business partners Davis and Short published the first issue of the Brunswick Advocate on June 8, 1837, they had lofty goals for both their paper and their newly prosperous city. Over the next two years, until the onset of a recession in 1839, the Advocate’s weekly editions illuminated local happenings and points of view on national issues. Today, the 103 editions of the Brunswick Advocate reveal what life was like for people here: men and women, young and old, enslaved and free.
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