Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge occupies twenty-seven hundred sixty-two acres on Georgia’s coast, combining marsh, grassland, woods, and cropland in a compact landscape renowned for birdlife. The peninsula, once called Dickinson’s Neck, took its present name from William Thomas Harris in the mid-eighteenth century. After the Civil War, land deeded to a former slave helped foster a Black community with homes and oyster and crab processing factories, but that settlement was uprooted in nineteen forty-two when the Army Air Forces seized the land for a base. Established as a refuge in nineteen sixty-two, Harris Neck still bears traces of its wartime airfield and remains central to continuing efforts by descendants to return.