Did you know that a former Muslim, a native of the Kingdom of Bornau, once taught in Culloden?

Nicholas Said came to Culloden in 1870 and taught school there for six months.

At this time in his life, Said was giving public lectures about his experiences.  [He gave one at the Monroe County Courthouse.]  Born Mohammed Ali bin Said in the Kingdom of Bornou, he was captured and sold into slavery in North Africa.  Later he became a servant to a Turkish army officer and then  of Admiral Alexander Menshikov of the tsarist navy.  Assuming the Christian name of Nicholas, Said came to North America in 1861.

During the Civil War, he fought with the 55th Massachusetts, a sister unit to the fabled 54th Massachusetts, the first military unit raised in the north consisting of black soldiers.  After the war, he taught in a freedmen’s school in Thomasville, Georgia.  There in South Georgia he began lecturing on his life experiences.  “Finding lecturing an unprofitable business,” the editor of the Advertiser wrote, Said “has been engaged in teaching school at Culloden in this county for the past six months.”

Culloden has had many outstanding educators, but none with a story more colorful than that of Mohammed Ali Bin Said, a. k. a. Nicholas Said.