06/19/2026
At the Breman, we are keepers of the Jewish stories of the South, and those stories include the whole picture of American history.
This early 20th-century photograph comes to us from the Minis family collection. The Minis family were among the earliest Jewish settlers in Savannah, arriving in the 1730s. This photograph from the Breman’s collection depicts an unidentified Savannah family posed with a rice mortar and pestle and handwoven seagrass baskets. Though likely intended for household use, these implements reflect enduring traditions and expertise brought by enslaved Africans and preserved across generations.
The wealth of coastal Georgia and South Carolina during the 18th and 19th centuries rested on the cultivation and export of rice—a prosperity built through the labor, knowledge, and skill of enslaved West Africans. They cleared forests, hand-dug vast systems of tidal irrigation, cultivated the crop, and processed it by hand. Rice was pounded in mortars with pestles to loosen the hulls, while handwoven seagrass baskets—now celebrated as cultural crafts—were used to separate the grain from the chaff. Rice only succeeded here as a crop because of their expertise.
On this Juneteenth, we also remember that freedom did not arrive all at once. Most enslaved people in Savannah did not learn of their freedom until Union forces arrived with General Sherman in December, 1864, nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January, 1863. We at the Breman acknowledge the family in this photograph as well as those whose names history did not keep.
