Cumberland Island: Wild Horses and Wilder Carnegie Sons

We left Jekyll Island several days ago and headed further south to Cumberland Island, the most southerly Georgia Sea Island. On the way we passed this fishing boat flying two huge Confederate flags. Nope, Toto, we're not in Kansas any more.

Cumberland Island is only accessible by ferry from St Mary's Georgia, or by private boat. The hurricane made the docks inaccessible to private boats, so we anchored there for a couple of nights and went ashore by beaching the dinghy. The ferry is still running, mostly bringing campers to and from the island. About 90% of the island is National Park land now and there are quite a few campsites tucked in the Maritime Forest with good access to beautiful beaches. 

Cumberland Island is known for its feral horses, which have survived there for centuries. There are about 150 horses on the island and they are completely wild. Some are very beautiful and others look a bit worse for wear. 

The island also has loads of armadillos, which apparently swam ashore there from the mainland and began populating the island who knows when.  They're only about a foot long and not very fearful of humans.  They're benign little animals, but quite odd-looking.

The photo above is of Jim sitting on the porch of the ranger station at Sea Camp - the headquarters for registering for camping sites and island tours at Cumberland.  Below is a photo of the Maritime Forest - sawtooth palmettos on the forest floor with maritime live oak and Spanish moss overhead. The island has mile of trails and dirt roads for biking and walking. Our first day on the island we saw very few people and just walked about 5 miles on our own to get a feel for the place.

This is a huge live oak...

 There are long boardwalks to get from the forest to the beach without disturbing the fragile dunes.

The Atlantic side of the island is one long (18+ mile) beach. Very, very wide, clean and great for walking. Apparently there are hundreds of sea turtle nests here in egg-laying season.

 The huge tidal range makes the beach enormously wide, and interesting for shell hunting.

After walking miles of beach, we took another boardwalk back over the dunes at the south end of the island to the salt marsh where a lot of the wild horses graze.

 Here are a couple of them - it's a pretty fuzzy photo since they were a long distance away.


The photo below shows live oaks, Spanish moss, palmettos and salt marsh - the typical vegetation of so much of this part of the coast.

The live oaks survive storms remarkably well, apparently because their trunks are so sturdy and their branches often touch the ground in a radial pattern, sort of acting as stabilizers.

At the south end of the island are the ruins of Dungeness Mansion, build by Thomas Carnegie for his wife Lucy Coleman Carnegie after her application for membership in the Jekyll Island Club, just a few miles north (see previous post), was rejected. Thomas Carnegie (brother of Andrew) was a self-made millionaire who didn't measure up for the Jekyll crowd because he wasn't a true blue-blood with inherited wealth. Lucy was furious and built a monstrous castle-like mansion to thumb her nose at her northern neighbors on Jekyll. To co-opt her 9 kids into living with her on Cumberland for half of each year rather than in their hometown of Pittsburgh, she offered each his or her own "starter" mansion as a wedding gift. She and her children and their various spouses and friends lived at Dungeness for decades, attended to by a staff of 305. None of her children worked a day in their life. They played polo, tennis, went sailing, hunted with horses and hounds, etc, etc, etc.

Her unmarried sons were true hellions. They would sneak off to nearby Jacksonville where they were repeatedly arrested and jailed for drunken disorderly conduct. To keep her sons on Cumberland Island, Lucy complied with their every whim, even building a separate residence right beside the mansion for their prostitutes.

Dungeness eventually burned to the ground and the remains are ghostly quiet today.

On our second day on Cumberland Island, we took a 6-hour van tour of the island with a phenomenal guide. Among the places we saw was the interior of the Plum Orchard "starter" mansion built for Lucy's son, George, and his 19-year old bride, Margaret.  When Margaret saw the mansion she complained that it was too small. Her father gave the couple $50,000 to add 3 wings to it.  This is the front entrance to Plum Orchard.

The photo below was taken in the "Ladies Room" - Tiffany lamps, Tiffany-designed wallpaper and a moose head mounted on the wall.

This is the enormous Mens Room  - more Tiffany lamps, hunting firearms cabinets, a fireplace, a piano, a gramophone, drinks cabinet and so on.... 

Further north on the island is the remains of a sizable community established by the freed slaves of Cumberland Island, most of whom stayed on the island for the remainder of their lives. This is one of their cabins. 

This tiny building is the community's Chapel of the First African Baptist Church in which the highly secret wedding of John F. Kennedy Junior and Caroline Bessette took place in 1996.  The stories we were told about the lengths to which everyone went to keep the wedding secret were pretty amazing.

We would highly recommend visiting Cumberland Island. It's a fascinating place.