Greyfield Inn

Dungeness on Cumberland Island, Georgia, is a ruined mansion that is part of a historic district that was the home of several families significant in American history. James Oglethorpe first built on Cumberland Island in 1736, building a hunting lodge that he named Dungeness. Oglethorpe named the place after the Dungeness headland, on the south coast of England. Dungeness was next the legacy of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, who had acquired 11,000 acres (45 km2) of island land in exchange for a bad debt. In 1803, his widow Catharine Littlefield Greene built a four-story tabby mansion over a Timucuan shell mound. During the War of 1812 the island was occupied by the British, who used the house as a headquarters. In 1818 Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a cavalry commander during the Revolutionary War and father of Robert E. Lee, stayed at the house until his death on March 25, 1818, cared for by Greene's daughter Louisa, and was laid to rest in nearby cemetery with full military honors provided by an American fleet stationed at St. Marys, Georgia. The house was abandoned during the U.S. Civil War and burned in 1866.In the 1880s the property was purchased by Thomas M. Carnegie, brother of Andrew Carnegie, who began to build a new mansion on the site. The 59-room Queen Anne style mansion and grounds were completed after Carnegie's death in 1886. His wife Lucy continued to live at Dungeness and built other estates for her children, including Greyfield for Margaret Carnegie Ricketson, Plum Orchard for George Lauder Carnegie, and Stafford Plantation. By this time, the Carnegies owned 90% of the island. The Carnegies moved out of Dungeness in 1925. In 1959 the Dungeness mansion was destroyed by fire, alleged to be arson. The ruins are today preserved by the National Park Service as part of Cumberland Island National Seashore. They were acquired by the Park Service in 1972.The main house comprises a portion of the larger historic district, which includes servant's quarters, utility buildings, laundries, cisterns, and a variety of other structures. The district forms a planned, landscaped ensemble. The most significant supporting structure is the Tabby House or Nathanael Greene Cottage, which dates to the Greene family's tenure.

Cumberland Island National Seashore preserves most of Cumberland Island in Camden County, Georgia, the largest of Georgia's Golden Isles. The seashore features beaches and dunes, marshes, and freshwater lakes. The national seashore also preserves and interprets many historic sites and structures. Instrumental in the creation and preservation of the seashore were several conservation organizations including the Sierra Club and the Georgia Conservancy. The island is only accessible by boat. The Cumberland Island Visitor Center, Cumberland Island Museum, and Lang concession ferry to the island are located in the city of St. Marys, Georgia. Public access via the ferry is limited, reservations are recommended. Camping is allowed in the seashore. The 9,886-acre (40.01 km2) Cumberland Island Wilderness is part of the seashore.

The St. Marys River (named Saint Marys River by the United States Geological Survey,) is a 126-mile-long (203 km) river in the southeastern United States. The river was known to the Indians of the area as Thlathlothlaguphka, or Phlaphlagaphgaw, meaning "rotten fish". French explorer Jean Ribault named the river the Seine when he encountered it in 1562. From near its source in the Okefenokee Swamp, to its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, it forms a portion of the border between the U.S. states of Georgia and Florida. The river also serves as the southernmost point in the state of Georgia. The St. Marys River rises as a tiny stream, River Styx, flowing from the western edge of Trail Ridge, the geological relic of a barrier island/dune system, and into the southeastern Okefenokee Swamp. Arching to the northwest, it loses its channel within the swamp, then turns back to the southwest and reforms a stream, at which point it becomes the St. Marys River. Joined by another stream, Moccasin Creek, the river emerges from the Okefenokee Swamp at Baxter, Florida/Moniac, Georgia. It then flows south, then east, then north, then east-southeast intersecting I-95 near Yulee, and finally emptying its waters into the Atlantic, near St. Marys, Georgia and Fernandina Beach, Florida.

The Crooked River is a 26.8-mile-long (43.1 km) river in Camden County in the U.S. state of Georgia. Primarily tidal, it is an inlet of Cumberland Sound. It rises in freshwater wetlands northwest of Kingsland and flows east into saltmarsh. Grover Island lies to the north of the main channel, and Crooked River State Park and Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base are to the south. The Crooked River ends at its junction with the Cumberland River at the north end of Cumberland Sound. Crooked River was so named on account of its meandering course.

Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay is a base of the United States Navy located adjacent to the city of St. Marys in Camden County, Georgia, on the East River in southeastern Georgia, and 38 miles (61 km) from Jacksonville, Florida. The Submarine Base is the U.S. Atlantic Fleet's home port for U.S. Navy Fleet ballistic missile nuclear submarines capable of being armed with Trident missile nuclear weapons. This submarine base covers about 16,000 acres (6,500 hectares) of land, of which 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) are protected wetlands.

Cumberland Island, in the southeastern United States, is the largest of the Sea Islands of Georgia. The long-staple Sea Island cotton was first grown here by a local family, the Millers, who helped Eli Whitney develop the cotton gin. With its unusual range of wildlife, the island has been declared a National Seashore. Little Cumberland Island is connected to the main island by a marsh.

Plum Orchard is an estate located in the middle of the western shore of Cumberland Island, Georgia, USA. The estate and surrounding area are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Designed by Peabody and Stearns for George Lauder Carnegie, a son of Thomas M. Carnegie and named after his uncle, Scottish industrialist George Lauder, it was formally dedicated on October 6, 1898. Peabody and Stearns also designed various additions to the mansion in the several following years, probably in 1906. After George Lauder Carnegie died, his widow, Margaret Copley Thaw, remarried and moved to Lake Naivasha, Kenya. Most of the original furnishings were sold, and furniture from Dungeness was brought in to furnish the house. The house was then occupied by the Johnston family, from Nancy Trovillo Carnegie Heaver/Johnston's branch of the family. The estate is now part of Cumberland Island National Seashore. The mansion also includes a rare squash tennis court.

The Fort Clinch State Park is a Florida State Park, located on a peninsula near the northernmost point of Amelia Island, along the Amelia River. Its 1,100 acres (4 km2) include the 19th-century Fort Clinch, sand dunes, plains, maritime hammock and estuarine tidal marsh. The park and fort lie to the northeast of Fernandina Beach at the entrance to the Cumberland Sound.

Fort Clinch is a 19th-century masonry coastal fortification, built as part of the Third System of seacoast defense conceived by the United States. It is located on a peninsula near the northernmost point of Amelia Island in Nassau County, Florida. The fort lies to the northeast of Fernandina Beach at the entrance to the Cumberland Sound, in the northeast part of the state. Today it is included within the boundaries of Fort Clinch State Park.

Duck House, part of the Richards estate, was a historic dwelling and is an archaeological site on Cumberland Island near St. Marys, Georgia. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 13, 1984, and burned down a few years later from a fire started by an illegal camper. During World War II the U.S. Coast Guard was stationed at Duck House. There is a Duck House Road and a Duck House Trail on the island. Campgrounds were proposed for the Duck House area but ecological concerns scuttled the idea.

The Amelia Island North Range Light was built to mark a channel over the sandbar at the mouth of the St. Mary's River, which led to the harbor at Fernandina Beach, Florida, on Amelia Island. It consisted of a lighthouse and a front range tower with a light, arranged so that when ships could see one light above the other, they were lined up with the channel. During the Civil War Confederate forces removed the lenses from the lights. Union forces seized Fernandina Beach, Fort Clinch and the lighthouse in 1862. It is known that the front range tower was destroyed during the war. There is no record of when the lighthouse was destroyed, but a new lighthouse was built in 1872. As the channel over the sand bar shifted with time, the front range light was periodically moved to maintain an alignment with the channel. In 1887 the rear range light was moved from the lighthouse to a tramway to permit proper adjustments to be made to the alignment. The light was decommissioned in 1899 after the channel was sufficiently marked with buoys. The lighthouse was listed in a survey in 1924, but has since disappeared.

Fort San Carlos was a military structure built in 1816 to defend the Spanish colonial town of Fernandina, Florida, now called Old Town, which occupied a peninsula on the northern end of Amelia Island. The fort, a lunette fortification, stood on the southwest side of the town next to the harbor, on a bluff overlooking the Amelia River. It was made of wood and earthworks, backed with a wooden palisade on the east side, and armed with an eight or ten gun battery. Two blockhouses protected access by land on the south, while the village was surrounded with military pickets. An 1821 map of Fernandina shows that the street plan, laid out in 1811 in a grid pattern by the newly appointed Surveyor General of Spanish East Florida, George J. F. Clarke, today preserves nearly the same layout as that of 1821. The fort occupied the area bounded by the streets Calle de Estrada, Calle de White, and Calle de Someruelos. The structure itself has disappeared and only traces remain in what is now Fernandina Plaza Historic State Park. The park contains the largest known undeveloped portion of the site of Spanish municipal and military activity on Amelia Island dating from the late 1780s. Archaeological investigations, starting in the early 1950s, revealed intermittent occupation and use of the area for as long as 4,000 years, beginning in the Orange period (2000–500 BC) and continuing to this day. A Spanish sentinel house was built in 1696 at the Timuqua village located there. Nearly all of Old Town was built on this Indian village and its shell heaps. In later colonial times the site gained military importance because of its deep harbor and its strategic location near the northern boundary of Spanish Florida.