Georgia Natural Wonder #15 - Cumberland Island 1349

[Top Row Dawg]

As we head from North Georgia to our next wonder, and as per Uncle John’s Dawg, we pass the world’s largest peanut in Ashburn Georgia, right off I-75. Lovingly maintained, the World's Largest Peanut is as fresh as the day it was built. A plaque on its brick base says that the peanut was erected on February 15, 1975, was designed by A.R. Smith, Jr., and was dedicated to the memory of Nora Lawrence Smith, member of the Georgia Journalism Hall of Fame and co-publisher of Wiregrass Farmer.



Georgia Natural Wonder #15 - Cumberland Island

Now honestly this should be one of the 7 Natural Wonders of Georgia if we are serious. The first list of natural wonders was compiled by the state librarian, Ella May Thornton, in response to an inquiry by a journalist. Her list, which appeared in the Atlanta Georgian Magazine on December 26, 1926, included Stone Mountain, Okefenokee Swamp, Amicalola Falls, Tallulah Gorge, Warm Springs, Jekyll Island Forest, and the marble vein in Longswamp Valley in Pickens County. The current official seven natural wonders are Stone Mountain, Okefenokee Swamp, Amicalola Falls, Tallulah Gorge, Warm Springs, Providence canyon and Radium Springs. Well this is how I rank them with brief explanation

1) Stone Mountain – Most visited destination in Georgia –largest exposed piece of granite in the world – largest carving in world
2) Tallulah Gorge – When water discharged and 4 falls full force
3) Okefenokee Swamp – Largest "blackwater" swamp in North America - Stephen Foster State Park side
4) Cumberland Island
5) Cloudland Canyon –(Canyon – Falls –Caves)
6) Pigeon Mountain – (Rocktown –Ellison Cave – Petty John Cave – Lost Wall – Pocket Trail)
7) Blood Mountain – (Summit views - Blood Mountain Falls –Sosebee Cove)

The next seven ranked so far

8) Providence Canyon – probably never take this away from current list, but dang it – It’s not natural.
9) Amicalola Falls –Another current wonder, will probably never take it off, but 5,6,7 just better to me overall.
10) Tray Mountain – ( two falls and summit views)
11) Mount Yonah
12) Radium Springs – Another current wonder – but casino gone, can’t swim in it, 5,6,7 trumps this one too.
13) Jekyll Island Forest – Over developed – visit for history more than natural wonder
14) Warm Springs – A current wonder but - Where were the Springs? I wanted to feel the warm water. Historical not Natural Wonder.
15) Longswamp Valley Marble Vein – Private property Quarry – can’t ever see. Mined out.

OK OK go ahead and bitch about it. Now back to the task at hand

(#15 on this list #4 in my heart) Cumberland Island

Cumberland Island, composed of Great and Little Cumberland islands, is the largest and southernmost in a chain of barrier islands extending the length of Georgia, known collectively as the Sea Islands or sometimes as Georgia's Golden Isles. Cumberland Island forms part of Camden County. Cumberland Island constitutes the westernmost point of shoreline on the Atlantic Ocean in the United States. Most of Great Cumberland has become the Cumberland Island National Seashore, administered by the National Park Service (NPS). Visitor access is by private ferry from Fernandina Beach, Florida, or by NPS ferry from St. Marys, Georgia. Overnight and week-long camping are permitted through the NPS headquarters.



Ecology

The island has three major ecosystem regions. Along the western edge of the island there are large areas of salt marshes. In the middle you will see gnarled live oak trees covered with Spanish moss and the palmetto plants in Cumberland's dense maritime forest.



Cumberland Island's most famous ecosystem is its beach, which stretches over 17 miles.



Georgia's coast is marked by extensive marshes, once regarded as unproductive but now known to be highly productive ecological systems. The two Cumberlands together contain approximately 16,600 acres of high land. The island, marsh, and estuary system, a major ecological feature of the Sea Islands, is brilliantly displayed at Cumberland, because in more than 350 years there has been little disturbance.



Sand beaches and dunes protect the islands from erosion and inundation by the sea. The islands protect the marshes from the force of the sea. The salt marshes trap sediments discharged from mainland rivers, protecting the appearance and recreational qualities of Cumberland's beach.

History

For thousands of years the island was visited cyclically by Timucuan Indians for shellfish. In the 1500s Spanish friars and soldiers, calling the island San Pedro Mocama, built a Catholic mission and a large fort. In the 17th century the island and the adjacent coast were controlled by the Tacatacuru chiefdom. The main village, known as Tacatacuru, was located towards the southern end of the island. During the time of European colonization, the Spanish recorded the names of at least six more villages on the island, and eleven more were located on the mainland. Sassafras, common to the Sea Islands, was a valuable medicinal shrub sought by Europeans. Cumberland's size and excellent harbor brought about very early trade contacts between Spanish and aboriginal islanders.



Historical records indicate that until 1681, there were approximately 300 natives and several Spanish missionary priests living on Cumberland Island. In 1683, French pirates attacked Cumberland Island, looting and burning many of the buildings. Many of the natives and the Spanish missionaries fled the island. An attack in 1684 by the Spanish pirate Thomas Jingle led to the final abandonment of the island. Survivors retreated to St. Augustine to the south.


English General James Oglethorpe arrived at the Georgia coast in 1733. Cumberland Island was named for William Augustus, the 13-year-old Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II.



Oglethorpe established a hunting lodge called Dungeness, named after a Dungeness headland Kent, on the south coast of England. It was the home of several families significant in American history.  A fort was erected at the southern point of the island called Fort William. At the northern end of the island, Oglethorpe built Fort St. Andrews. For a decade the small village of Berrimacke existed near the fort. The forts were built to defend English settlements to the north from the Spanish in Florida. After the English defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742, the need for the forts ended. They abandoned the forts and eventually the village disappeared. No trace remains today of Fort William, and most signs of Fort St. Andrews have been washed away.


Oglethorpe looms large in Georgia history on these islands.

Between 1765 and 1769 thirteen Georgians received the first land grants on Cumberland. These tracts became the fifteen plantations and small farms cultivated by slave labor during the nineteenth century. Dungeness was next the legacy of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, who had acquired 11,000 acres of island land. Greene founded most of southern Cumberland Island as a result of a business deal used to finance the army. Greene died in 1786. His wife, Catharine Littlefield Greene, remarried Phineas Miller ten years later; and they built a huge, four-story tabby mansion on top of a Timucuan shell mound. She named it Dungeness, after Oglethorpe's hunting lodge.


General Green. Catharine Greene.

The mansion featured 6-foot thick walls at the base, four chimneys and 16 fireplaces, and was surrounded by 12 acres of gardens. Dungeness was the site of many special social galas, where statesmen and military leaders enjoyed the Millers' hospitality. The Millers were the first major planters of Sea Island cotton on Cumberland. They held a total of 210 slaves to work the plantation. Catharine and Phineas Miller helped Eli Whitney develop the cotton gin, debuted in 1793.


Gin and Whitney.

While Sea Island cotton was by far the largest and most valuable commercial crop, other documented agricultural products such as indigo, rice, and food crops were also grown. Rice sloughs are still visible on the island through satellite imagery. According to national oral history, live oak wood from the island was used to build the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides" in the 1790s.


It was actually a colonial plywood, two sheets White Oak with thick sheet Live Oak between like an Oreo cookie.

When the island was briefly occupied during the War of 1812, the British used Dungeness as their headquarters. In an unprecedented move the Royal Navy took away more than 1,400 coastal slaves. For eight weeks in 1815, the British flag was raised at Dungeness, to which the slaves flocked in eager response to a British emancipation proclamation. The freed slaves moved to Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and Trinidad.


Freed Slaves Bermuda

In 1818, an ill General "Lighthorse" Harry Lee, a Revolutionary War hero, cavalry commander, father of Robert E. Lee, and old friend of Catharine Greene, was returning from the West Indies when he asked to be taken to Dungeness. He stayed at the house for a month of illness until his death on March 25, 1818, cared for by Greene's daughter Louisa, and was laid to rest in nearby cemetery with full military honors provided by an American fleet stationed at St. Marys, Georgia. His son, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, had a tombstone placed over the grave and visited his father's final resting place several times. In 1913, the body of Harry Lee was re interred to Lexington, Virginia, to lie beside his famous son, but his gravestone was left on Cumberland Island.



By the time of the Civil War, Robert Stafford had become the major planter and landowner on Cumberland Island and one of the largest planters in Camden County. His grave is on the main road of the island. The Millers' Dungeness burned down in 1866.


Ruins of original Dungeness.

In the 1880s Thomas M. Carnegie, brother of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and his wife Lucy bought land and two defunct plantations on Cumberland for a winter retreat. In 1880, with seven children at Fairfield and the city of Pittsburgh becoming increasingly hazardous to health due to its burgeoning industry, Thomas and Lucy began seeking a summer home along the southern East Coast for their family. The previous year, the Carnegies had met reporter Frederick Ober while on vacation in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Ober told them about an island plantation he was writing an article about. In 1880, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine published an article by Ober about Dungeness.Although it had suffered an extensive fire in 1866 and was uninhabitable, the mansion had a storied past. The article drew the attention of Lucy Carnegie (who had attended boarding school as a girl in nearby Fernandina), and the Carnegies decided the place would be an ideal summer home. The mansion's owner was ex-Confederate General William George MacKay Davis, a first cousin of Confederate President Jefferson Davis who bought the plantation from its creditors in 1879. In 1884, they began building a lavishly appointed estate for hunting and entertaining.



They built a mansion on the site of the old Dungeness, though Carnegie never lived to see its completion. Over the next four months, the burned-out mansion was demolished and noted Pittsburgh architect Andrew Peebles designed a massive Queen Anne Style mansion with wraparound verandas, high ceilings, several porches, many turrets, and a 100-foot high tower.Lucy and their nine children continued to live on the island, naming their mansion Dungeness after that of Greene.



Dungeness was designed as a 59-room Queen Anne style Scottish castle. They also built pools, a golf course, and 40 smaller buildings to house the 200 servants who worked at the mansion.



The Carnegies moved out of Dungeness in 1925. The last time Dungeness was used was for the 1929 wedding of a Carnegie daughter.



After the Crash and the Great Depression, the family left the island and kept the mansion vacant.


April 1959.



It burned in a 1959 fire, believed to have been started by a poacher who had been shot in the leg by a caretaker weeks before.



Today, the ruins of the mansion remain on the southern end of the island.



The ruins are today preserved by the National Park Service as part of Cumberland Island National Seashore. They were acquired by the Park Service in 1972.



The main house comprises a portion of the larger historic district, which includes servant's quarters, utility buildings, laundries, cisterns, and a variety of other structures.



The district forms a planned, landscaped ensemble. The most significant supporting structure is the Tabby House or Nathanael Greene Cottage, which dates to the Greene family's tenure.


Greene Tabby House.

While his wife Lucy continued to live at Dungeness she built other estates for her children. By this time, the Carnegies owned 90% of the island.


Historic Dungeness photos of Carnegie's.

These include:  Greyfield for Margaret Carnegie Ricketson, Plum Orchard for George Lauder Carnegie, and Stafford Plantation.

• Greyfield Inn

Greyfield is an estate with a Colonial Revival-style house of the same name on Cumberland Island in Camden County, Georgia.



It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.



It has also been known as Greyfield Inn since opening to the public as an inn in 1962.



The house was built during 1901 to 1905 for Margaret Carnegie Ricketson and her husband Oliver Ricketson, and was one of several built for Carnegie family members within a large Carnegie family estate on Cumberland.



Their daughter Lucy Carnegie Ferguson lived in the house for over seventy years.



It is now a private inn owned by the Carnegie family.



Today, the furnishings and style remain true to its history.



Greyfield Inn offers 15 comfortable rooms in the main house and two additional cottages.



Cozy fireplaces and a breezy, shaded veranda make the inn a wonderful year-round travel destination.



The library, dinner bell, and a serve-yourself bar all come together to make guests feel right at home.



Our 1.5-acre Greyfield Garden supplies a bounty of fresh vegetables, fruit, herbs, honey, and even fresh cut flowers, making each meal at Greyfield a truly authentic farm-to-table experience.


Farm to Table.

Greyfield Inn is the sole commercial establishment on Cumberland Island, giving guests an unprecedented opportunity to connect with nature at its most pristine.



• Plum Orchard

Donated to the National Park Service in 1972, which maintains it and gives daily tours.



Plum Orchard Coordinates: 30.855933°N 81.465238°W it is an estate located in the middle of the western shore of Cumberland Island, Georgia.
The estate and surrounding area are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.



Designed by Peabody and Stearns for George Lauder Carnegie, a son of Thomas M. Carnegie and named after his uncle, Scottish industrialist George Lauder, it was formally dedicated on October 6, 1898. Peabody and Stearns also designed various additions to the mansion in the several following years, probably in 1906.



After George Lauder Carnegie died, his widow, Margaret Copley Thaw, remarried and moved to Lake Naivasha, Kenya (on the continent of Africa).
Most of the original furnishings were sold, and furniture from Dungeness was brought in to furnish the house.



The house was then occupied by the Johnston family, from Nancy Trovillo Carnegie Heaver/Johnston's branch of the family.



The estate is now part of Cumberland Island National Seashore.


The mansion includes a rare squash tennis court.

• Stafford Plantation

The Stafford Plantation was a plantation on Cumberland Island in Camden County, on the southeastern coast of Georgia.



It was established in the early 19th century by Robert Stafford.

19th century

Stafford acquired portions of lands belonging to General Nathanael Greene through auction, and continued to assemble former Greene family lands so that by 1830 Stafford controlled 1,360 acres with 148 slaves.



In 1843 Stafford acquired 4,200 acres from P.M. Nightingale, a Greene descendant who retained Dungeness. The primary crop was Sea Island cotton.



Robert Stafford died in 1877. His heirs sold the property to Thomas M. Carnegie and his wife Lucy, who had also acquired Dungeness.



All that remains of Stafford's house is a ruin known as "the Chimneys," a series of 24 hearth-and-chimney structures representing Stafford's slaves' housing, about one kilometer east of the main house.



20th century

The Stafford Mansion was built by Lucy Carnegie in 1901, for one of her children.



It was one of a series of Carnegie houses on the island, including Plum Orchard, Greyfield, and the main Carnegie residence at Dungeness.

Present day

The property is privately held under a life estate by a Carnegie descendant.



The caretaker of the estate (nearby homes and an air-strip) and his family live in the residence all within Cumberland Island National Seashore.



The Carnegie family owned 90% of the island in the 1960’s.

The North End

Although before 1800 Cumberland was almost uninhabited, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, small farmers settled on the north end of the island. Other white island residents at this time worked as innkeepers and pilots for St. Andrews Sound. One of these pilots, James Clubb, directed the Wanderer (the last ship to bring slaves from Africa to the United States) to nearby Jekyll Island in 1858. By 1860 more than 500 slaves resided there in a black-to-white ratio of seven to one. These north end families owned some slaves, and during the Civil War, most of these people moved to the mainland when Union forces occupied the island.



At the end of the Civil War (1861-65), military authorities placed Cumberland within the Sherman Reservation, a thirty-mile-wide land reserve running the length of the Georgia–South Carolina coast. It was established (1865-66) as a reservation for freedmen to receive land of their own. Former slaves and their descendants continued to live on the island after the Civil War. One community existed in the Brick Hill area of the island between 1862-1891. Many of these freedmen were farmers. In the 1880s, another community formed at what is now called "The Settlement". It was a residential area for black workers, as Georgia had passed laws requiring racial segregation of housing and public facilities back then. The First African Baptist Church, established in The Settlement in 1893, was rebuilt in the 1930s. It is one of the few remaining structures of this community.

 
Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr married in a secret ceremony on September 21st 1996.The ceremony took place at The First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island just off the coast of Georgia. Carolyn wore a $40,000 one of a kind Narcisco Rodriguez dress with Manolo Blahnik shoes.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, innkeeping was the primary business on the north end. The most prosperous hotel was located in the High Point area and attracted guests who belonged to the rising middle class. Visitors arrived on steamboats and enjoyed activities such as fishing, hunting, and going to the beach.



At the height of the innkeeping era in the 1890s, guests numbered around 750. Black residents of the north end staffed the hotels: they served as waiters, cooks, laundresses, and drivers of the horse-drawn trolleys that transported guests. Hotel Cumberland at High Point was sold in 1918 and became a private club. The Candler family of Atlanta, associated with Coca-Cola, owned part of the north end.


High Point Cumberland island.

High Point-Half Moon Bluff Historic District

The High Point-Half Moon Bluff Historic District, on Cumberland Island near St. Marys, Georgia, is a historic district that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It is located within Cumberland Island National Seashore.



The listing included 21 contributing buildings and nine contributing sites on 700 acres.



It includes the North End of Cumberland Island, including Half Moon Bluff, the Martin's Half Moon Bluff Tract and High Point or Candler Estate.



It includes religious structures, a hotel, and single dwellings.



Present-day conservation Cumberland Island

In 1954 some of the members of the Carnegie family invited the National Park Service to the island to assess its suitability as a National Seashore. In 1955 the National Park Service named Cumberland Island as one of the most significant natural areas in the United States and plans got underway to secure it. Simultaneously, the State of Georgia was working on plans to secure the island as a state park.



Plans to create a National Seashore were complicated when, in October 1968, Carnegie descendants sold three thousand acres of the island to the real estate developer Charles Fraser, who had developed part of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Fraser met with conservationist and then Sierra Club executive director, David Brower, on the island to discuss how to develop the area. This meeting and discussions between Fraser and Brower was documented in one of the three parts of the book Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee who traveled with Fraser and Brower as they toured Cumberland Island. Brower pushed for a 90/10 split, with 90% of the land to remain undeveloped.



However, the thought of any additional development on the island beyond the structures already erected by the Carnegies and Sam Candler, who also owned part of the island, caused activists, politicians, members of the Carnegie and Candler families, and a number of organizations, including the Georgia Conservancy and the Sierra Club, to band together and push Fraser to sell to the National Park Foundation.



They, along with others, also helped push a bill through the US Congress that established Cumberland Island as a national seashore. The bill was signed by President Richard Nixon on October 23, 1972. The Carnegie family sold the island to the federal government. With donations from the Mellon Foundation, Cumberland Island became a national park.

Resources

Horses and range cattle were early settlers' first economic mainstay, but cotton was financially Cumberland's most rewarding crop. Many foods, especially corn and peas, were raised for consumption on the plantation. Dungeness Plantation successfully produced oranges until insect infestation destroyed its large grove in 1837. Timber was lucrative from the earliest days of settlement. Cumberland's live oaks were extensively cut by teams of loggers to fill naval contracts for masts and spars, and "live oaking" on Cumberland helped build the post-Revolutionary American navy.



As the forest disappeared, new fields were cleared for cotton. Superior grades grown from Sea Island seed were eagerly sought by brokers from northern U.S. states and England. The long-staple Sea Island cotton was first grown here by a local family, the Millers, who helped Eli Whitney develop the cotton gin. Sea Island cotton thread had a tensile strength almost equal to modern nylon, making it valuable for the gigantic high-speed looms of nineteenth-century manufactories.

Wildlife

The loggerhead sea turtle is threatened by loss of nesting habitats and the general exploitation of shorefront property on North American beaches. Little Cumberland and the northern end of Great Cumberland provide approximately eight miles of desirable and protected nesting beach.



Cumberland's interior maritime forest is studded with saltwater coves, freshwater ponds, and inland swamps, all providing shelter for migratory ducks and such long-legged wading birds as the American ibis ("wood stork"), heron, and egret.



There are white-tailed deer, squirrels, raccoons, nine-banded armadillos, wild boars. They even stocked the Island with bobcats.



Alligators inhabit the numerous small ponds and swamps, feeding upon small mammals or fish.


Hell Cumberland Island Gators stalk the beach. Sharks in water - Gators on beach.

Now the presence of open-range livestock, especially hogs, is discouraged because of their impact on turtle nesting. Wild horses, once a notable feature of Cumberland's landscape, are being removed because they forage on sea oats and other beach grasses vital for dune stabilization. No man........ they are the best part.



Current and Future Status

Cumberland Island is really two islands—the island proper and Little Cumberland Island — connected by a marsh. While sometimes confused to be a part of Cumberland Island, Little Cumberland is a separate island and is not a part of Cumberland Island. As are the private properties on Cumberland Island, Little Cumberland Island is not open to the public.



A small number of property owners, principally property owners who preserved the island and protected it from massive commercial development, still own houses and other fee simple private property on the southern, western and northern regions of the island. Some, however, have sold their property to the National Park Service (NPS), with an agreement that retains their ownership and full property rights during their lifetime. Eventually, some of this property will become part of the Cumberland Island National Park.

Internal Threats

Because of retained ownership properties there are now threats of new structures to be built. This is being contested. Future use of the Sea Islands is of major interest to Georgia. Proposals for the commercial and recreational development of the islands have stimulated intense controversy in the state legislature, in local press and national magazines, and at public hearings.



External Threats

Since the national seashore was established, a Navy nuclear submarine base has been built on the mainland opposite, which requires frequent dredging to the river so that it will be deep enough. There is also a proposed spaceport on the mainland where rockets could malfunction while traveling out over the island, and Navy exercises and oil exploration that may bring loud blasting noise into waters offshore. This area hosts endangered right whales as well as many other forms of sea life, including sea turtles and dolphins.



Little Cumberland Island

I am just going to throw Little Cumberland in on this Natural Wonder. At the north tip of Cumberland Island is Little Cumberland Island, a 2,400-acre tract that is separated from the big island by Christmas and Brockington creeks. Though part of the Cumberland Island National Seashore, Little Cumberland Island is privately owned and not open to visitors without an invitation. With 1,600 acres of uplands, this Holocene island is larger than Sea Island, but has less beach with approximately 2.5 miles of sand.



There are 100, 2-acre lots where development is allowed, but only 36 homes have been built. Little Cumberland has monitored sea turtle nesting since 1964, longer than any other island on the Georgia coast. Unfortunately, the island has seen drastically reduced numbers of turtle nests, declining from an average of 151 in the 1970s to an average of 44 in the last 10 years, for reasons that are not entirely clear to scientists.



Little Cumberland Island and the historic communities known as the Settlement and High Point located just across the creek on Big Cumberland form the north end. This area has a separate history from the south end because the two were located 18 miles away from each other. The northenders' commercial and social activities were influenced by their proximity to St. Simons and Brunswick, while the southenders were influenced by the settlements of St. Marys and Fernandina.



Most interesting on Little Cumberland Island is the Little Cumberland Lighthouse, the southernmost beacon on the Georgia coast. Privately owned and maintained by the Little Cumberland Island Association, the 60-foot-tall lighthouse, 22 feet at the base tapering to 11 feet at the top, began operation in June of 1838. It is on the north end of Little Cumberland Island adjacent to main Cumberland Island, in Camden County on the southeast coast of Georgia.



When in service the light marked the entrance to St. Andrew Sound and the Satilla River. It also marked a shoal that extends about 6 nautical miles  south-southeasterly of the light.

History


The lighthouse as seen from Jekyll Island

The 60-foot Little Cumberland Island Lighthouse was designed by Winslow Lewis and built in 1838. The light featured a stationary lantern that contained fourteen Lewis lamps generating a fixed light, which distinguished it from the older tower to the south that had a revolving light.  Also known as the St. Andrews Lighthouse, it was improved in 1867 with a third order Fresnel lens. The lantern room received its third-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in France by Henri LePaute. The new light had a range of 14 nautical miles with a focal height of 71 feet above sea level. In 1874,  imperiled by the encroaching Atlantic, the base was fortified by a brick wall and oyster shells.


Photograph of the Little Cumberland Island lighthouse after its restoration in 2016.

The lighthouse was in service until 1915 when it was deactivated by the Lighthouse Service. The keeper's house and all other light station buildings, are long since gone; However, thanks to dedicated owners, the lighthouse has been restored and remains in pristine condition. The lighthouse was renovated by the owners from 1994 to 1998 and again in 2016 by the nationally acclaimed company The Durable Restoration Company. The lighthouse house and surrounding property is privately owned and is not open to the public.  A large dune protects the lighthouse from the ocean, and as a result, the tower is now barely visible from the water.

Designation

The lighthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was designated on August 8, 1989.



The Little Cumberland Island lighthouse is a private property and access in not permitted without permission from the owner.



The lighthouse at Little Cumberland Island is the southernmost lighthouse in Georgia but it wasn’t always so. Another lighthouse was placed on the southern end of Cumberland Island in 1820 and was in service for eighteen years. It still exists but not where it was originally built. You’ll have to drive down to Amelia Island, just across the border in Florida to see it. The entire brick lighthouse was dismantled and moved there. Cement was not as tough as it is today and the mortar between the bricks was easier to chip apart but I still can’t imagine disassembling a tower some seventy feet high with five foot thick walls and moving it piece by piece but that’s what they did. It is the northern most lighthouse in Florida and still operates today.



National Register of Historic Places in Camden County (Cumberland Island) Georgia.

Duck House

Duck House, part of the Richards estate, was a historic dwelling and is an archaeological site on Cumberland Island near St. Marys, Georgia.



It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 13, 1984, and burned down a few years later from a fire started by an illegal camper.



During World War II the U.S. Coast Guard was stationed at Duck House.



There is a Duck House Road and a Duck House Trail on the island.

Dungeness (Cumberland Island, Georgia)

See Above.

Greyfield Inn

See Above.

High Point-Half Moon Bluff Historic District

See Above.

Little Cumberland Island Lighthouse

See Above

Main Road

The Main Road, also known as Grand Avenue and as Stafford Road, on Cumberland Island in Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys, Georgia was built in 1870.



It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.



It is about 13 miles long and about eight to ten feet wide.



Portions existed by 1802; it was complete by 1870.

Plum Orchard

See Above

Rayfield Archeological District

Rayfield Trail runs north-south, beginning at the Main Road on the north end, then running through Kings Bottom Trail ending at Ashley Pond Trail.



Rayfield is characterized by its wide open spaces, scenic views of Cumberland’s tidal creeks, and beautiful pine forests. Hikers can use Rayfield to access the Table Point/Ashley Pond/Kings Bottom Trail complex.



The north end of the trail ends at the Main Road, across from Oyster Pond Trail, which is an excellent avenue for hikers to explore the east and west side of the island without having to traverse the dusty Main Road.

Stafford Plantation

See Above.

Table Point Archeological District

Probably the most scenic and desirable of trails in the vicinity of Plum Orchard, Table Point Trail is a beautiful hike bordering the Intracoastal Waterway.



A great location for bird-watching, photography and a general sense of serenity, this wilderness trail is sure to take your breath away. Table Point can be accessed on the south entrance through Table Point Road or on the north entrance via Ashley Pond Trail.



This trail complex borders the saltwater marsh and occasionally opens up to a scenic view of the Brickhill River. On a breezy day, you can observe the Spanish moss rippling in the wind.



Table Point stands alone in its tranquility, as hikers are immersed in majestic habitats. One hiker mention a lot of ticks.

Wrap Up

Cumberland Island (and Little Cumberland Island) remains in a relatively natural state because of its inaccessibility as well as the stewardship of past owners. It is one of the most spectacular natural habitats in the Northern Hemisphere. The greatest and most lasting value of the Island is its ability to change us. It is a place of transformation. It is this intangible feature that seems to be the most important benefit which Cumberland Island has for its guests. This spiritual quality is what, year after year, its visitors, residents, and Park Service employees seem to believe is its most important contribution to our people. Today's GNW gal has found love on Cumberland Island.