In the spring of 1994, Leslie Tichich first suggested that a community play based on oral history interviews with local people would be a unique way to celebrate Bulloch County's bicentennial in 1996. Residents of the town of Colquitt, Georgia had organized such a production, "Swamp Gravy," and their success and visit to Bulloch County inspired support for a similar project in Bulloch. Ms. Tichich recruited both community and university volunteers and financial support for the project.
Barbara Hendry, a cultural anthropology professor at Georgia Southern university, volunteered to direct the oral history project. She began training community and student volunteers to do oral history interviews in 1994 and procured a Community Service grant from Georgia Southern University to hire student research assistants and purchase equipment for the project. The Bulloch County commissioners also contributed funds for equipment. By the Fall of 1995, sixty-three county residents had been interviewed, and ninety-two cassette tapes produced. The student assistants also cataloged, or summarized, each tape and made verbatim transcriptions of selected portions of each tape. Due to time and budget constraints, complete verbatim transcriptions of each tape could not be made.
The tape catalogs (summaries) and partial transcripts were used by Dr. Patricia Pace, Communication Arts professor at GSU, to write the bicentennial play, "Wiregrass." Dr. Pace also used other historical sources. The play was performed by eighty-five community and university volunteers from April 24-27, 1996. Over 3,000 people attended these performances.
The tapes, catalogs, partial transcripts and related materials from the oral history project were placed in the Statesboro Regional Library and in Henderson Library for future community and scholarly use.
This collection contains a wealth of information about Bulloch County and about the rural South in general. Most of the interviewees were aged sixty-five and older, so much of the collection reflects their lives in the county from earlier decades of the twentieth century. One of the primary goals of the project was to gain an understanding of everyday life in the county from a variety of perspectives. The collection could be used for a variety of purposes, such as : scholarly research on specific topics, public programming for community activities, curriculum development for local schools, genealogical and family history research.