Gilded Age redux? Fed plan OKs new mansions on ‘primitive’ Georgia island

The refined Greyfield Inn, where visitors can sleep in a Carnegie house for $1,000 a night.

And High Point, a seven-home family compound built nearly a century ago by the son of Asa Candler, the founder of Coca-Cola. The property is accessible via a private airstrip.

For the last eight years, descendants of those business titans have been discussing land swaps with Cumberland’s largest property owner, the federal government.

The feds want to acquire family lands near the island’s main public dock, campgrounds and walking trails managed by the National Park Service. In exchange, the Carnegie and Candler kin would get public property in out-of-the-way locations where they can construct the next generation of family homes.

The prospect of new development comes despite a U.S. Congress decree in 1972 that Cumberland Island should be “permanently preserved in its primitive state.” It also coincides with a government push to expand visitation beyond the estimated 150 daily tourists.

Conservationists sense a looming threat to a barrier island where herds of wild horses roam and almost all visitors travel on foot or bicycle and pitch a tent if they stay overnight.

Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The angst has grown amid recent revelations about the land swaps. Preliminary agreements in two of the deals are now public and outline home development rights. Depending on the legal interpretation, they permit construction ranging from a collection of modest dwellings to massive buildings that could rival those from the 19th century.

“The Gilded Age is returning, and worse than it was before,” said David Kyler, director of the Brunswick-based environmental group Center for a Sustainable Coast, a critic of the swaps.

The Carnegie heirs scoff at that rhetoric. The deals are scheduled for public review and comment this fall, and family representatives are speaking out to clarify details they say have been exaggerated or misconstrued.

They insist they have long been good stewards of the island and, since Cumberland was designated a national seashore in 1972, partners with the National Park Service in protecting it.

“We enjoy the island like the rest of the public does; we’re low-key and respectful,” said Barclay McFadden, the 76-year-old great-great-grandson of Thomas Carnegie. “Our memories there stretch back generations. It’s a near-and-dear place to us, a sacred place.”

Credit: Curtis Compton

Credit: Curtis Compton

A retreat for the Carnegies and Candlers

Cumberland is the southernmost of Georgia’s barrier islands and, at more than 36,000 acres, the state’s largest. It’s where Gen. James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, built forts for defense against Spanish Florida; where Revolutionary War Gen. Nathanael Greene was awarded land for his heroism fighting the Redcoats; and where a planter named Robert Stafford operated an immense cotton plantation.

Yet the name that would come to define Cumberland is Carnegie. The family’s ties to the island date to the 1880s, when another coastal Georgia island, Jekyll, was morphing into a winter retreat for America’s business tycoons.

The northeasterners behind the Jekyll Island Club — the Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors and Vanderbilts — rejected the Carnegie brothers for membership. Andrew and Thomas were Scottish immigrants who made their fortune in the Midwest and, as Cumberland tour guides claim, were told “their blood was not blue enough” for Jekyll.

So Thomas and his wife scouted the next island south, Cumberland, and over time the family would purchase about 90% of it. The Candler family, meanwhile, bought their High Point acreage in 1930, a little more than a decade after they sold a controlling stake in Coca-Cola for $25 million (about $480 million in today’s dollars) to Robert Woodruff.

Credit: Chris Viola / AP

Credit: Chris Viola / AP

By 1950, managing the island had become a chore for the Carnegies, and they invited the National Park Service to consider it as a possible new park. It took until 1972 and a development threat from another landowner, famed Hilton Head Island resort developer Charles Fraser, for the deal to be struck.

In the years that followed, the federal government and nonprofit conservation groups acquired all but about 1,000 acres of Cumberland, or 98%. The remaining privately owned land belongs mostly to Carnegie and Candler descendants.

Several of those parcels are involved in the land swaps.

New land means new homes

The real estate proposals could trigger what would constitute a building boom on an island home to just 61 residences. Only seven homes have been constructed this century; only one since 2008.

The proposed swaps, as first unveiled to the public in 2024, had the potential to expand that inventory by as many as 23 dwellings. One of the swaps has been abandoned, cutting that number by up to eight homes. The Ferguson family, owners and operators of the Greyfield Inn, withdrew from negotiations because the National Park Service “got greedy” and made the deal’s terms “not acceptable,” according to Walter Langshaw, the great-great-grandson of Thomas Carnegie.

That one of the swaps was nixed more than a year ago speaks to the opaque — critics say secretive — process surrounding the deals. The National Park Service has not acknowledged the termination of the Ferguson negotiations.

In response to interview requests and emailed questions regarding the land swaps, the National Park Service pointed to a pending environmental assessment and public comment period.

“The proposed exchanges are intended to address long-term management considerations for natural, cultural and visitor resources on the island and to consolidate land ownership in areas where National Park Service and private lands are intermingled,” it wrote in a statement. “The National Park Service welcomes public participation and will provide additional information when the environmental assessment is released for public comment.”

Another fact sparking transparency concerns is that the federal agency released the two draft deeds only after Defenders of Wildlife, a national nonprofit, forced the issue using Freedom of Information Act requests.

The McFadden family is to receive property that includes a dock and access roads as part of their swap, according to a draft agreement, fueling speculation that they intend to start a tourism business on the newly acquired site.

But zoning laws restrict their use to a hotel, museum or bait shop. Barclay McFadden chuckles when asked about interest in such business ventures. An eco-hotel might be viable, he said, but is not being contemplated.

“And I don’t think we’d do too well selling mud minnows and fiddlers in a bait shop,” he said.

Yet the McFaddens would get the opportunity to build two new homes on the property they acquire through the swap — one more than on the parcel they are trading. They own four existing dwellings on another parcel.

The other two swaps come with even greater home building potential. And, for the families involved, there is the opportunity to cement their presence on Cumberland for the future.

Credit: Cumberland Island National Seashore

Credit: Cumberland Island National Seashore

Looking out for future generations

For the Candlers and the Fosters, the swap negotiations came at an opportune time.

Both families are due to forfeit existing dwellings on the island in the coming decades as part of “life estate” deals struck long ago. Homes included in life estates will revert to federal ownership upon the deaths of all the family members who were alive when the agreements were signed.

All the Candlers’ existing homes are in the High Point family compound sold in 1982 as a life estate for more than $9 million. The deal came with the understanding that they don’t have to surrender the property until the last of 28 family members dies. More than 15 of those descendants are alive, according to public records, with the youngest now in their late-40s.

Under their proposed land swap, they would surrender property in the more heavily trafficked southern part of the island for permanent rights to a larger High Point plot on the northern tip of the island. Development permissions also would allow them to build as many as nine new homes.

The Candler family declined to comment for this article.

Facing a similar but slightly different reality to the Candlers is the Fosters. They, too, have a life estate but also own a separate parcel where they already have the right to build up to four new homes.

But the property outside the life estate is in a visitor-intensive area, and swapping it for land off the beaten path — and where they can build up to six houses for future generations — “makes more sense,” a member of the Foster family, Whit Foster, recently told a coastal Georgia-based online news outlet, The Current.

Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Size (of homes) matters

Whether the families build vacation villas or millionaire mansions on their new properties is the greatest mystery of the Cumberland land swaps.

The draft deeds to the swaps made public cap square footage at 15,000 square feet under roof at a maximum height of 35 feet. The National Park Service said the intention is to limit all structures and paved areas on a parcel to a combined 15,000 square feet, and the Carnegie heirs say that’s their understanding as well. They say any structure bigger than 5,000 square feet would be impractical anyway.

But the 35-foot height would allow structures up to three stories tall. Watchdog groups fear property owners could interpret that as a three-story structure under a 15,000-square-foot footprint — or 45,000 square feet, bigger than any other structure on the island, including the Dungeness ruins.

Where the square footage language came from remains unclear. Some of the heirs say they neither lobbied for nor discussed the square footage language. Some of them speculate the 15,000-square-foot figure was adopted from an existing template and slipped through, as several federal government real estate attorneys have come and gone during the eight years of discussions and negotiations.

The McFaddens and Fosters say they don’t envision building homes that are Gilded Age grand on the properties they acquire through the swaps. Only one home built by the living generations on Cumberland measures more than 5,000 square feet, and the majority measure less than 3,500 square feet. McFadden said any new homes his family builds on the to-be-acquired property would be more “cottage-y” than mansion-like.

As for the Candlers, the homes in their current High Point compound range in size from 1,430 square feet to 6,700 square feet.

The uncertainty stokes unease among conservation and environmental watchdog groups. Kyler with the Center for a Sustainable Coast calls the details of the McFadden and Foster draft deeds a “slap in the face of the intent of the law” that established Cumberland Island as a national seashore.

The director of Wild Cumberland, another conservation group, uses more measured language but warns the island is nearing a defining moment.

“What’s been revealed so far is incongruent with the intent of the seashore as an undeveloped, primitive place for the public,” said Wild Cumberland’s Jessica Howell-Edwards. “There is a thread here where families ensure their legacies on the island.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC