On Georgia's Cumberland Island, a National Park Service proposal to swap land with descendants of the Carnegie family would allow up to eight new private homes on what is now parkland, NPR reported, in a partnership with Georgia Public Broadcasting.
The 18-mile barrier island, one of the largest and most ecologically diverse along the Atlantic coast, is home to wild horses, feral hogs and deer, salt marshes, maritime forest and a stretch of beach reachable by the public only by ferry. The Park Service has managed Cumberland Island National Seashore since 1972, including about 9,800 acres of wilderness that an act of Congress said "shall be permanently preserved in its primitive state." The island also holds Native American relics, remnants of Spanish missions, plantation ruins, and opulent homes built by Gilded Age industrialist Thomas Carnegie and his wife, Lucy, who had nine children. Their descendants still live or vacation on private property there.
Superintendent Melissa Trenchik has been giving media tours under live oaks on the island's west side, looking out over a salt marsh and Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay. That parkland, under the proposal, would go to two branches of Carnegie descendants for as many as eight homes. The idea, she said, is to consolidate private ownership on the west side so the park can better protect and interpret the Atlantic beachside, including wilderness where the government could then prohibit development. "Right now, if we do nothing, development is possible," she said of the private land the service hopes to acquire. The plan drew more than 12,500 public comments. Trenchik called the homes "modest" and said they would face permanent conservation limits and a 35-foot height cap. Critics say a 15,000-square-foot allowance, including driveway and outbuildings, is hardly modest. "We're swapping for McMansions," said Joseph Manning, an attorney with Defenders of Wildlife.
Manning argued the swap fits a broader pattern of deals that, in his view, benefit private interests rather than expanding public access. Carol Ruckdeschel, an 85-year-old naturalist who has lived on the island more than 50 years and still surveys beaches each Friday for sea turtles, called the plan "the first nose under the tent" toward more development and "a real affront to the American people." She is also unhappy that the park service plans to double daily visitation, up to 700 people a day. "They're supposed to be protecting this place," she said. Ruckdeschel, who works with the conservation group Wild Cumberland, said she is friends with Carnegie descendants and does not doubt their love of the island, but she wants the rewilded forest to keep reclaiming old plantation fields.