Jekyll Island & Cumberland Island: Gilded Age to Wilderness Shore

The Jekyll Island Club operated from 1888 to 1942, when wartime security concerns forced the island's evacuation. In those 54 years the membership roster represented an almost incomprehensible concentration of American wealth: J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Joseph Pulitzer, Marshall Field, and dozens of other financiers and industrialists wintered here each season. The guided tram tour of the Historic District, departing from the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, visits the major surviving cottages and interprets the social world that made the island so remarkable. The tour enters Faith Chapel (1904), the nondenominational chapel built for the membership, whose interior contains two extraordinary Tiffany Studios stained-glass windows installed in the apse — among the finest examples of Tiffany glass in Georgia.

Inside a restored 1903 powerhouse building on the Historic District grounds, the Georgia Sea Turtle Center rehabilitates injured sea turtles found in Georgia coastal waters and offers the public a window into their care. The rehabilitation pools hold recovering loggerhead, green, and Kemp's ridley turtles — many victims of boat strikes or cold stunning — and staff interpreters explain the ecology and biology of each species as well as the conservation challenges they face along the Georgia coast. Jekyll Island's beaches host one of the most active loggerhead nesting programs in the state, with volunteer nest monitors patrolling the beach nightly from May through August.

The 45-minute ferry crossing from St. Marys to Cumberland Island is itself a transition into another world: the tidal rivers of the Georgia coast, alive with dolphins, ospreys, and great blue herons, open onto the island's Dungeness Dock on the south end. A short walk from the dock through live oak forest leads to the Dungeness ruins, the roofless tabby and brick shell of Thomas Carnegie's 1884 mansion. Carnegie, younger brother of Andrew Carnegie, purchased most of the island and built a 150-room winter estate that burned to the ground in 1959. The ruins, draped in vegetation and haunted by wild horses that shelter in their shadows, are among the most dramatically beautiful historic ruins in the American South.

Approximately 150 feral horses roam Cumberland Island's 36,000 acres of maritime forest, beach, and scrub, descendants of horses brought to the island by the Carnegie family in the late 19th century. Over more than a century of feral life, the herd has adapted to the island's challenging conditions — foraging on sea oats, marsh grass, and acorns, drinking from freshwater ponds in the island's interior, and tolerating the heat and insects of the Georgia coast with remarkable equanimity. The horses are genuinely wild, not habituated to people, and encounters with them — often on the beach at dawn, or in the shadow of the Dungeness ruins — have an elemental quality that is difficult to find anywhere else in the East.

A half-mile walk from Dungeness through an oak tunnel of extraordinary beauty leads to the First African Baptist Church, a small white clapboard building constructed in 1937 by the Gullah community that lived in the Halfmoon Bluff settlement on Cumberland Island's north end. The church is best known internationally as the site where John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were secretly married on September 21, 1996 — the couple chose the remote island and the small historic church specifically because its isolation ensured privacy. But the church's own history is the more substantial story: it was built and used by the descendants of enslaved people who had lived on the island for generations, and the surrounding cemetery, shaded by enormous live oaks, holds many of their graves. Services were held here until the 1970s.

Cumberland Island's Atlantic beach stretches 18 miles from tip to tip without a single building, road, vehicle, or commercial establishment visible from the water's edge. The beach is wide, clean, and constantly worked by the surf, with loggerhead sea turtle nests marked by NPS stakes in summer and shorebirds — black-bellied plovers, sanderlings, red knots on migration — running the tideline year-round. Picnic on the beach and walk as far as your legs will take you in the time before the afternoon ferry back.

The afternoon ferry back to St. Marys follows the same tidal river channel as the morning crossing, now in a different light — often golden and hazy in the Georgia afternoon. Dolphins frequently ride the boat's bow wake along the channel, and ospreys can be spotted on channel markers. The 45-minute crossing is a decompression chamber between the wilderness island and the mainland world.