When taking the 45-minute ferry ride from St Mary's Georgia, the first thing you realize about Cumberland Island is that it's huge. It's a barrier Island in southern Georgia that is bigger than Manhattan. It is about 16 miles long and 3 miles wide at its widest.
Everything is pack in, pack out, but they do have filtered water to fill bottles with. Otherwise, capacity on the island limited; you need to reserve ferry and camping spaces ahead of time.
The Island was authorized as a National Seashore in 1972 and is administered by the National Park Service. A small number of private property owners remain and it has one commercial hotel run by the descendants of Andrew Carnegie.
The island has maritime forests, salt marshes and undeveloped beaches that support a wide variety of life, including 30 species of mammals and 55 kinds of reptiles and amphibians.
The feral horses are probably the easiest to spot and they are beautiful. They were brought to the Island by settlers and by the the end of the 1700's landowners reported an estimate of 200. When the Carnegie family moved to Cumberland in the 1880s, they brought horses, too, with over fifty stabled at Dungeness. Through the years, horses were taken on and off the island. Property owners maintained them as free ranging livestock through the 1960s. When the park was established in 1972, the horses had become feral. They live about 9 to 10 years and have a estimated population around 150.
Besides the amazing beauty of nature, the island has a lot of history. Native Americans, Spanish Missionaries, enslaved African Americans and Industrialists all spent time there. Cumberland was also the place where John F Kennedy Jr got married to Carolyn Bessette.
Due to the size of the island and because some things were closed due to Covid, we'll need more trips to see all that we wanted to see. On this trip, we made a walking trip to Dungeness Ruins and some trails—about eight miles. For a fee, you can bring your own bikes or rent them there.
Dungeness is a ruined mansion and is part of of a historic district that was home to several famous families in American history.
James Oglethorpe first built a hunting lodge on Cumberland island in 1736. He named it after Dungeness in England. The next Dungeness was built by Catharine Littlefield Greene, widow of Revolutionary hero Nathanael Greene in 1803. During the War of 1812, the island was occupied by the British, who used the house as their headquarters. In 1818 Henry Lee, father of Robert E Lee stayed there, and was taken care of by Greene's daughter Louisa until his death. The house was abandoned during the Civil war and burned in 1866.
In the 1880's, Thomas Carnegie, brother of Andrew Carnegie, purchased the property and started building a 59-room Queen Anne Style Mansion that was completed after his death in 1886. His wife Lucy lived there and built several estates for her children. By that time the Carnegies owned 90 percent of the island. The Carnegies moved out of Dungeness in 1925. In 1959 the Dungeness mansion was destroyed by a suspicious fire.
What is there now is the ruins of the mansion and a larger historic district that is a planned landscaped ensemble. The Tabby House or Nathanael Greene Cottage, dates to the Greene family's tenure, but most of the buildings there now are from the Carnegie estate.
I think it's one of the nicest places in Georgia, and I'll be back in cooler weather. The ferry ride is wonderful, too. St Mary's has some wonderful restaurants and B and B's. For those looking to stay on the island, there's camping or the historic, expensive and posh Greyfield Inn. The Inn has its own ferry from Amelia Island.
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