Cumberland Island National Seashore, photo by the National Park Service.
Spain settled Georgia’s Sea Islands in the second half of the 16th century and quickly established Catholic missionary provinces among the indigenous tribes. Cumberland Island, the largest of Georgia’s isles, was the site of a large Spanish fort and several Catholic missions, where members of the island’s large Timucua tribe learned Spanish and converted to Catholicism. The Spanish occupation of the island lasted almost a century, ending only when pressure from other European and American Indian competitors and pirate raids forced them to abandon the Georgia Sea Islands and relocate south to St. Augustine, Florida. In the 18th century, Britain, and later the United States, owned the island, which then passed into private ownership. Today, its natural beauty and historic features are preserved by the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
Pedro Menendez de Aviles, by Francisco de Paula Marti, 1791.
During the early decades of Spanish Florida, the colonial territory stretched from South Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1565, Florida governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led the first successful colonizing expedition of civilians, priests, and soldiers to the colony. Upon arrival, Menéndez forced a small party of French settlers from the region and then established missions, towns, and forts along the eastern coast, including St. Augustine, the oldest surviving European city in the United States. The Spanish colonized the Georgia coast at that time and settled on its defensible barrier islands. In 1569, colonial soldiers built a large fort and garrison on Cumberland Island, which they called San Pedro Island, in present-day southeast Georgia. European and Native American traders had already known the island for its profitable sassafras tree production, and the Timucua Indians called the island “Wissoo,” which means sassafras. In 1587, Franciscan priest Baltazar Lopéz arrived on the island and established the San Pedro de Tacatacuru mission.
At the island and throughout inland Georgia and northern Florida, the Spanish made contact with the Timucuan tribe. This American Indian group lived in present-day Georgia and Florida during Spanish colonization. The Timucua included many tribes that spoke different dialects of the Timucua language, including the Tacatacuru, who lived on Cumberland Island and spoke the Mocama dialect. The San Pedro missionaries’ goal was to convert the Tacatacuru tribe to Catholicism and persuade the Indians to adopt Spanish culture. In exchange for the benefits of living at the mission, the Tacatacuru labored to support the Spanish.
Timucuan People.
The mission system dramatically altered the lives of the Tacatacuru at Cumberland Island. Before the Spanish arrived, the Tacatacuru moved seasonally between the island and the mainland. Afterward, the tribe settled permanently on the island and adopted a sedentary lifestyle based on European animal husbandry and agriculture, which kept them close to the mission year-round. Spanish missionaries taught Tacatacuru Christians to speak Spanish and, for some, to read and write it. The missionaries also learned to speak the Timucuan dialects and created a written form of Timucuan, which some indigenous people learned and used to communicate with one another. In the early 17th century, Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja wrote several Catholic primers in Timucuan.
The missionaries oversaw the construction of the first San Pedro de Tacatacuru church in 1587. Although no records remain describing what the first mission looked like, it is possible to speculate. Other similar Spanish mission churches in the region were built of wattle-and-daub construction, in which woven wooden branches or strips were plastered with a simple mixture of mud, clay, or animal dung. They also had roofs of thatched palmetto leaves.
Franciscan Missionaries.
In 1597, Guale Indians from the north attacked the island and destroyed the Spanish mission buildings. Led by Chief “Don Juan,” the island’s Tacatacuru Catholics defended the island against the attack. They replaced the first church with a second, San Pedro de Mocama, in 1603. According to reports, it was more impressive than the first mission church, with wooden slat walls rather than mud-and-branch walls. The Franciscans also built a second adjacent mission, San Pedro y San Pablo de Porturibo, on the island’s north end. They founded another mission, San Felipe de Athulteca, in 1675, and the Spanish intended to continue building on the island. Still, outside threats forced them and the Catholic Timucua to abandon their missions by 1684.
When England officially established Carolina in 1670, its English and Scottish colonists exerted pressure along the northern border of Spanish Florida to compel the Spanish to move south. At Cumberland Island, Spanish and Timucua Catholics lived in fear of raids and enslavement by the British and the unconverted American Indian tribes. In 1684, the colonists were planning to abandon their settlements when two separate attacks by English and French pirates destroyed the remaining Cumberland Island missions and drove out the island’s Spanish inhabitants. The French attacked first and raided two of the island’s mission churches. The second attack came after an English pirate, Captain Thomas Jingle, led a failed attempt to take the colonial capital at St. Augustine and brought his six remaining ships to the harbor at Cumberland Island. The Spanish and Timucua fled from their homes, and those who escaped the raids eventually resettled at St. Augustine.
Cumberland Island Dunes by the National Park Service.
Although the Spanish abandoned Cumberland Island, Spain did not formally relinquish its claim to the island after the missions closed. Native Americans and independent mestizos inhabited the island until James Oglethorpe, the founder of the British colony of Georgia, arrived there in 1736. Oglethorpe renamed the island after the Duke of Cumberland, and his colonists built two forts there: Fort St. Andrew and Fort Prince William. The Spanish attacked the forts and attempted to recapture Cumberland Island in 1742, but were unsuccessful. Spain and England fought over the ownership of the coastal region until the 1763 Treaty of Paris, when Spain ceded Spanish Florida to England. Georgia became a U.S. State in 1787, and the United States annexed the rest of Florida after the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.
In the 19th century, Cumberland Island was home to plantations that produced timber and Sea Island cotton. General Nathanael Greene, who led the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was one of the first Americans to own property on the island. Several of his 19th-century heirs were among those who owned plantations on Cumberland. By the Civil War, there were about ten plantations on the island. Chattel slavery supported these plantations, and in 1850, there were 455 black slaves producing cotton on Cumberland Island.
The ruins of the Carnegie Dungeness Mansion, Cumberland Island, Georgia, by the National Park Service.
Northern industrialist Thomas Carnegie and his wife, Lucy, bought an estate of 1,891 acres on the island after the post-Civil War collapse of Cumberland’s plantation system. Over the years, the Carnegie family bought additional property until they owned 90% of the island. In 1884, the couple began building a mansion for a winter retreat on the site of a former hunting lodge called Dungeness. Thomas Carnegie didn’t live to see the mansion’s completion, but Lucy and her nine children continued to live on the island and named the mansion Dungeness. The mansion was designed like a Scottish castle and contained 59 rooms. The estate also included pools, a golf course, and 40 smaller buildings to house the 200 servants. The last time the mansion was used was for the 1929 wedding of a Carnegie daughter. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the family left the island, and the mansion remained vacant for the next 30 years. It burned in 1959. Today, the ruins of the mansion remain on the southern end of the island.
During the Carnegie heydays, Lucy also built additional estates on the island for her children. Greyfield, built in 1900, is now a private inn owned by the Carnegie family. The Stafford Mansion, built in 1901, is also privately owned by members of the Carnegie family. The estate caretaker and his family reside in the residence. The 22,000-square-foot Plum Orchard mansion, built in 1898, was donated by the Carnegie family to the National Park Service in 1972, and tours are offered daily.
Other elite American families purchased land on the island in the late 19th and 20th centuries and kept private estates there.
Plum Orchard Mansion, Cumberland Island, Georgia, by the National Park Service.
The National Park Service acquired the island in 1972 and created the Cumberland Island National Seashore to protect its resources. Today, the park encompasses more than 9,000 acres of marshes, forests, waters, and shores of the historic island. Although no surface evidence of the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and Timucua presences remains today, their history is part of the island’s rich American heritage.
Only 300 members of the general public may visit the island each day, and the park recommends that visitors make reservations in advance of their trip. Visitors can access the island by ferry, which departs from the park headquarters in St. Mary’s, Georgia. On the island, park visitors can board park trams or rent bicycles to tour the historic properties and access the island’s public areas for camping, hiking, fishing, swimming, and wildlife watching. Visitors can also take a walking tour offered by Molly’s Old South Tours, the island’s only regularly scheduled tour covering the Dungeness Historic Area.
More Information:
Cumberland Island National Seashore
101 Wheeler St
St. Mary’s, GA 31558
912-882-4336
Cumberland Island Walking Tour (Molly’s Old South Tours)
Compiled & edited by Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated December 2025.
Also See:
National Parks, Monuments & Historic Sites
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