Telling Savannah's Stories
The 40 Acres and a Mule Playhouse is the culmination of 20 years of plans and efforts to tell Savannah's hidden history. In 2007, Fritz and Lorrie Rumpel wrote and produced a play called Let My people go, which highlighted major events in Savannah's history between 1733 and 1865. To listen to a feature story on Let My people go on Georgia Public Broadcasting, click .
Coming out of this play, the Rumpels produced the docudrama Forty Acres and a Mule and developed the 40 Acres and a Mule Tour. More recently, they developed two plays, "What a Wonderful Revolution!" Susie King Taylor and Sweet Georgia Brown. In 2026 they opened the 40 Acres and a Mule Playhouse to serve as the hub for all their activities of telling Savannah's stories.
Source Materials for Our Programs
In order to develop a tour, 2 plays, a film and a book that have the ring of authenticity, the Rumpels have invested thousands of hours of research time poring over such primary resources as public and private correspondence, private diaries, contemporaneous newspapers and journals, government documents, and speeches from the years 1733 to 1865. To listen to an excerpt of the newspaper account of "The Weeping Time," one of the largest sale of human beings in North American history, click .
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In addition, they have relied on the published memoirs of Civil War-era officers, nurses and journalists to help tell the complex truth of Savannah's past. The results are projects that tell a story of freedom through faith with intriguing subplots along the way.