Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [64]
Cumberland, the largest and most southerly of the Sea Islands, stretches north from St. Marys Inlet to St. Andrew Sound. It is eighteen miles long and three miles across at its widest. There are no paved roads, no bridges, no stores. The double dunes of the barrier beach, the mudflats and maritime forest of oak, pine, and palmetto, are home to loggerhead sea turtles, armadillos, white-tailed deer, bobcats, feral horses and hogs, and more than 277 species of land and sea birds whose bones litter the sand.
Arrowheads and oyster middens attest to the presence of the Timucua people, who called the island Missoe. French corsairs landed there, British and Spanish flags flew over forts on the north and south ends of the island, and James Oglethorpe, founder of the new colony of Georgia, established a hunting lodge he called Dungeness near the Indian burial grounds at the south end. In 1803, the widow of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene built another Dungeness close by. Within its thick walls, Light-Horse Harry Lee died, and legend has it that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin there. In antebellum times, Cumberland, with its temperate climate and marsh-fed soil, thrived. The harvest of timber, indigo, figs, cotton, and sugarcane made the plantation owners rich. After the Civil War, the island’s mansions were burned and abandoned, and the freed slaves who remained built a community on the north end near Half Moon Bluff called the Settlement.
But it is the Carnegie legacy that looms largest. Through a stone and iron gate at the end of a wide sandy road, you can still see the crumbling façade of the Gilded Age mansion. In 1959, after years of neglect, it was set on fire by a poacher after a hunting dispute. Wild turkeys scurry about the rubble, and crows gather on the spire of a skeletal brick wall. But it was not always so.
In 1882, at the site of the old Greene mansion, steel magnate Thomas M. Carnegie began construction of a winter retreat for his family. In its heyday, this Dungeness—visited by Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers—rivaled the fabled mansions of Newport and Southampton. A turreted Victorian affair, it boasted fifty-nine rooms, a carriage house, an indoor swimming pool, squash courts, manicured gardens, a golf course, a working farm, and accommodations for a staff of two hundred. After Thomas’s death, his wife, Lucy, went on to acquire 90 percent of the island and built homes for her children, notably the Cottage, Plum Orchard, Stafford House, and Greyfield, now an inn run by her descendants.
In the 1960s, in an effort to protect the island from development, family members began selling tracts to the U.S. government, and in 1972 Cumberland became part of the National Seashore, with parts of the north end later designated as a Wilderness Area. So unless you know someone who lives there or come with tent in hand, Greyfield Inn is where you stay.
The air was thick and salted when we landed. Someone from the inn met us at the dock. Bearded, he had a smile like Bacchus, deeply tanned feet in worn sandals, and black curls that fell over a wide, seaworthy face. “Hey, I’m Pat,” he greeted us in a Coastal drawl, then threw our bags in the back of a jeep.
“Where’s the inn?” John asked. “Can we walk?” After an hour and twenty minutes on the slow ferry, he was itching to move.
Pat cocked his head to the right. Amid looping dirt paths and horses nibbling at the scrub of what was once a grand lawn, Greyfield rose like Tara through a stand of live oak trees shrouded in silver moss.
Built in 1900 as a wedding gift for Margaret