October 23, 1972

Its unmatched beauty has been around for millennia, but the largest of Georgia’s Barrier Islands only became a National Seashore on this day in 1972.

Cumberland Island is the southernmost of Georgia’s Sea Islands. This magical place is noted for having several unique ecological systems: beaches and dunes, inland maritime forests, and saltwater marshes. The 57-square-mile island is home to wild horses, sea turtle nests, and a variety of other wildlife. Native Americans visited the island for thousands of years before the Spanish built a fort and mission there in the sixteenth century.

Then, in the 1760s, thirteen Georgians received the first land grants on Cumberland. Those grants would be the foundations of the slave-based Sea Island cotton plantations of the nineteenth century.

The Carnegies of Pittsburgh bought land on Cumberland in the 1880s as a private hunting reserve, but in the 1960s, the Carnegies and other landowners worked with the federal government to convert Cumberland into public land. The result: one of Georgia’s great natural treasures, the Cumberland Island National Seashore, established by Congress on October 23, 1972, Today in Georgia History.