Cumberland Island Two-Day: Deep Wilderness & Plum Orchard

Before boarding the ferry, take 30 minutes to see Orange Hall, an 1829 Greek Revival mansion considered one of the finest surviving antebellum buildings in Georgia. The house is set among orange trees that give it its name — St. Marys had a brief 19th-century orange-growing economy — and the interior is furnished with period antiques and interpreted by knowledgeable local docents. It is a small but elegant house, and its survival in near-original condition in this small coastal town is remarkable.

Arriving at Dungeness Dock and walking to the Carnegie mansion ruins sets the tone for everything that follows on Cumberland Island. The tabby-and-brick shell of the 150-room mansion stands in the maritime forest, its roofless rooms open to the sky and colonized by ferns and vines. Wild horses graze the clearing in front. The combination of industrial Gilded Age ambition and returning wilderness is unlike anything else on the East Coast — a memento mori in brick and resurrection fern.

Sea Camp Beach, accessible via a short trail from the Sea Camp Dock (the ferry's second stop), is the primary day-use beach on Cumberland Island's south end. The beach is wide and clean, with consistent Atlantic surf and a dune system backed by dense sea oats. This is an excellent swimming beach on calm days, with no rip currents at low tide. Loggerhead sea turtle nests are marked along the beach in summer.

A 2.5-mile walk north from Dungeness Dock through the live oak forest — the canopy here is so dense it feels like walking through a tunnel — leads to the First African Baptist Church, the 1937 white clapboard church where JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married in September 1996. The surrounding cemetery, shaded by moss-draped live oaks, holds the graves of generations of the Gullah community that lived on Cumberland Island through the Carnegie era.

St. Marys' most reliable waterfront dinner spot — casual seafood, shrimp and grits, and cold beer after the ferry ride back from Cumberland. Budget-friendly alternative to Greyfield's all-inclusive dining.

Plum Orchard is the most astonishing building on Cumberland Island and one of the most remarkable historic houses in the South. Built in 1898 for George Carnegie (son of Thomas Carnegie) and his wife Margaret, it is a 22,000-square-foot Georgian Revival mansion designed by Peabody and Stearns of Boston — the premier residential architects of the Gilded Age — and it sits in the island's interior forest, 5 miles north of Dungeness along the Main Road, looking as though a Newport cottage was set down in the middle of a wilderness. The house has survived in remarkable condition despite decades of abandonment: the plaster ceiling medallions are intact, the mahogany paneling is sound, the racquetball court in the basement is still identifiable. The NPS gives tours of the interior on weekend mornings during the warmer months; the exterior and grounds can be visited any day. The 5-mile walk or bike ride to Plum Orchard from Dungeness Dock, through the tunnel of live oaks that forms the Main Road, is one of the finest walks in the Golden Isles.

The Nightingale Trail runs east from the Main Road north of Plum Orchard through dune scrub and palmetto thicket to the wild north end of Cumberland Island's Atlantic beach — one of the most remote and least-visited sections of any National Seashore on the East Coast. The beach here feels genuinely the end of the world: the low dune line gives way to an almost flat expanse of sand stretching to both horizons, with wild horses sometimes grazing the swale between the dunes and the maritime forest. Shorebird concentrations here on migration can be extraordinary.

The return walk south along the Main Road in the afternoon light is among the most beautiful walks in the eastern United States: the live oak canopy creates a continuous tunnel of extraordinary depth and shadow, Spanish moss swaying in the sea breeze, armadillos rooting through the leaf litter, deer stepping across the road in filtered afternoon light. The horses are often encountered on or near the road in the afternoon, moving between the forest shade and the open areas near the beach crossings.