Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (10 page)

For the next thirty years, Lucy was queen of Cumberland. In her towering fifty-nine-room mansion, she hosted exquisite dinner parties and lavish galas that were attended by industry chiefs, politicans, and celebrities. Guests in elegant topcoats and evening gowns sipped mint juleps on the veranda and waltzed the night away in Gatsbyesque grandeur. In the smoke-filled parlor, cocky young heirs in silk-collared tuxedos loosened their ascots and wagered staggering sums in poker.

Dinners were always formal. Waiters stood behind the chair of each guest at an enormous round dining room table. Gourmet dinners were served on gleaming dishes trimmed in fourteen-carat gold. Picnics were only slightly less ceremonious. Servants carried trays of hot food from the mansion out to gazebos with white gingerbread trim, where long tables were covered with white satin cloths and set with silver. Occasionally the family picnicked on the beach, where they fished, swam, rode horses, and roped sea turtles to small wagons for races.

The mansion was surrounded by marble patios, fountains, greenhouses, statues, and rose gardens framed by arched hedges. The immaculately manicured Dungeness lawn hosted croquet tournaments and horseback races. Lucy’s family and friends also enjoyed a golf course, tennis courts, a skeet shooting range, and a marble-floored pool house, where high diving boards and parallel rings were suspended above the seventy-five-foot-long heated pool. Mischevious Carnegie heirs secretly greased the second ring, then bet unsuspecting guests that they couldn’t make it across the pool.

“Of course they’d always bite. And then they’d fall, right smack in the water,” recollected Nancy Copp, Lucy’s great-granddaughter.

The pool house was also where some of the most serious boozing took place. “The Carnegies liked to drink,” recalled Polly Stein Carnegie, the wife of one of Lucy’s grandsons. Rarely were they seen without a cocktail in hand. From time to time, Carnegie boys drove the boat twenty miles to Jacksonville and spent the night carousing, and occasionally they ended up in jail. One Carnegie heir regularly instructed a servant to set up a card table in the middle of the woods and pour him shots until he passed out.

“There was an underlying sadness in some of the Carnegie clan, exiled to a remote island with a powerful matriarchal figure in charge, leaving them with nothing to do but hunt and fish, drink too much, and chase after what women could provide,” recalled Lucy’s great-grandson James “Pebble” Rockefeller Jr.

Over three hundred employees labored daily to keep the Carnegies happy, including cooks, laundresses, chambermaids, and butlers, all of whom were white. Blacks worked outside the mansion. Most of the stable cleaning, road maintenance, farming, buggy driving, and lawn mowing was done by Robert Stafford’s former slaves.

Lucy bought a 119-foot yacht, which she named
Dungeness
, and in 1884 she became the first female member of the New York Yacht Club. She proudly wore a commodore hat held in place with a diamond-studded hairpin and cruised from the Bahamas to Maine with family and friends. A crew of seventeen drove it daily to the mainland for supplies. They also hired trains to deliver food and clothes from New York down to south Georgia.

Lucy and her family initially used Cumberland as a winter retreat, traveling back north to their Pittsburgh manor for most of the year. But Lucy eventually moved to the island full-time, and as she got older she hoped her nine children would follow. To encourage them, she made an incredible offer: when her children married, she would build each one a mansion on the island. Four of them took her up on it.

Lucy built Stafford Mansion on Robert Stafford’s former cotton plantation for her eldest son, Bill, an avid golfer who installed an eighteen-hole course in the old cotton fields. Wild Bill also liked gambling and fast cars. His claim to fame was being able to jump flat-footed into a barrel and then jump back out, a feat that earned him thousands in wagers. Bill drank heavily and married a prostitute, which got him banished from the island by Lucy. He lived for a while on a boat moored to the dock in St. Marys, the mainland town across from Cumberland. After his wife died, he built a small house along the waterfront, which had the reputation of being a brothel. Wild Bill lived out his days sipping bourbon from the dock and gazing longingly at Cumberland in the distance.

Lucy built the Cottage, a twenty-nine-room house at the end of Dungeness’ west lawn, for her fourth son, Morris. As a child, Morris was cleaning his rifle when the gun accidentally fired. The bullet only grazed his head, but his siblings joked that it triggered his liberal leanings. Morris read Karl Marx and other socialist writers. For fun, he left socialist tabloids on the tables of the ultraconservative Racquet and Tennis Club in New York. Morris also helped persuade Uncle Andy to establish his charitable library foundation.

Plum Orchard Mansion was constructed for Lucy’s fifth son, George. It was the largest and grandest of her children’s mansions and the farthest from Dungeness—nearly nine miles north, on a bend of the Brickhill River. It would later become the most controversial, too.

The fourth mansion, Greyfield, was built for her first daughter, Retta. The three-story manor boasted wide porches overlooking saltwater marshes and the Intracoastal Waterway. Retta’s daughter, Lucy Ferguson, turned the grand house into the opulent Greyfield Inn.

As Lucy’s health diminished, she feared her island empire would crumble after she died. So she drew up a will that strictly forbade the sale of any mansions or land on her island estate until all of her children had died. In the winter of 1916, Lucy passed away in her sleep.

Lucy had been the glue that held her family together. In the decades after her death, the family’s cohesiveness weakened and its money began to run dry. None of her children ever held jobs. Some heirs squandered their riches. Others lost money in sour business deals. Dungeness was boarded up, and eventually other mansions were shuttered, too.

By the 1950s, many of the Carnegie children and grandchildren wanted to cash in on their island property. Though Lucy’s will prevented the sale of their lands, they logged several parts of the island for quick cash, and then hatched a plan to strip-mine the island for titanium. It technically would not require the sale of any property, only the leasing of mineral rights. However, extracting the titanium would require extensive forest clearcutting, leaving behind deep gashes and a flattened, denuded wasteland.

In 1955, the Carnegie heirs sought bids from several companies. The highest bidder was Glidden, a corporation that promised $4.25 million in royalties to the Carnegies. Over seven thousand acres—roughly half of the island—was slated to be mined and cleared.

Nearly everyone in the Carnegie family was ready to sign on the dotted line—except one significant holdout, Nancy “Big Nanny” Carnegie Rockefeller. Her family called her “a fly in the ointment” for standing in the way of the mining plans. But Nancy knew that Lucy would not have approved of strip-mining Cumberland. The proposal violated both Lucy’s will and the spirit of the island.

“I had to stop it,” Nancy said. “Mining the island would have desecrated it.”

Big Nanny sued her own family, and the case went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. She prevailed, and in 1957 the strip- mining plans were scrapped.

When the last of Lucy’s nine children died in 1962, several Carnegie heirs immediately sold their lands to developers, including Hilton Head investor Charles Fraser. He was a brash, balding, potbellied man who planned to build a gated community of expensive homes on Cumberland. Fraser bulldozed property boundaries across the island—which later became the North and South Cut Roads—and cleared an airport runway to accommodate corporate jets. He constructed his cedar-sided real estate headquarters on the south end at a spot he dubbed Sea Camp. His blueprints outlined plans for dredging Lake Whitney, establishing a marina, building tiki bars along the beach, clearing a new golf course, and transporting visitors to the island on aerial gondolas.

He brought down his ninety-foot yacht from Hilton Head so he and his cohorts would have comfortable quarters during the construction of the resort. In the late 1960s, he began meeting with other Carnegie heirs, hoping to purchase the remaining island properties. Swaths of clearcuts were already razed, and smoke was belching from Fraser’s earth-moving machines. It appeared nothing could stand in his way.

Except another gritty island woman.

Retta Wright, Lucy Carnegie’s granddaughter and heir to Plum Orchard mansion, wasn’t going to let the island be destroyed by developers. She realized that the last hope for protecting the island was the National Park Service. It had been eyeing Cumberland since 1955, when it had announced plans to create a network of national seashores, since only 6 percent of shoreline along the Atlantic coast was protected. National Seashores were national parks focused on protecting beach resources and recreation. The National Park Service recommended sixteen sites along the Atlantic for national seashore status: Cumberland Island was ranked second, just behind Cape Cod, as most impressive and most urgent. Environmental groups rallied behind the Cumberland Island park proposal, especially when they learned of Fraser’s plans for the island.

While other Carneiges were sipping wine with Fraser, Retta invited President John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Interior, Stewart Udall, to tour the island. He liked what he saw, and he began working on a national seashore bill for Cumberland Island. Meanwhile, Retta implored her family to consider selling to the National Park Service instead of Fraser. Initially, the rest of the family resisted the idea of a national park. They found it distasteful that big government might open their vacation playground to the general public.

But they were growing increasingly hostile toward Fraser, especially after a Carnegie heir married one of Fraser’s junior executives. The wedding was held at Plum Orchard mansion, and Fraser arrived at the reception carrying a large suitcase of maps. To the Carnegies’ horror, he unrolled his blueprints while the newlyweds danced, and he touted his eco-sensitive development plans in between toasts. The Carnegies’ disdain for the obnoxious, new-money developer soon soured into outright revulsion. They decided not to sell any more land to Fraser and joined Retta in negotiations with the National Park Service.

The National Park Service offered island families a sweetheart deal: not only would it pay them millions for selling their land, but the families would also get to continue living on their land for the rest of their lives (or for a set number of years). Each of the twenty-one landowners who sold their property to the National Park Service received special rights to live, drive, and recreate within the national park. The National Park Service would maintain their roads, haul off their trash, and build docks for their use. They could lease their vacation properties. The National Park Service would also keep their estates private and ensure they could frolic separately from the unwashed masses. It was the best of all possible worlds: receive millions, guarantee the upkeep and protection of the island, and continue to live there for decades to come.

Nearly all of the Carnegies sold to the National Park Service. Retta’s family generously sold their land for significantly less than market value, and they donated Plum Orchard mansion outright. Other Carnegie families were not as altruistic. They sought top dollar for their lands and secured lifetime rights for unborn grandchildren.

After the Carnegies turned on Fraser, he grudgingly signed over his lands to the park. He used the money from the sale to build a deluxe development on Florida’s Amelia Island, just south of Cumberland. But he remained bitter about how the Carnegies had vilified him. He pointed out that, despite their professed love for Cumberland Island, the Carnegies had clearcut large portions of Cumberland and tried to strip-mine the island. “The Carnegies on Cumberland are among the most selfish families in America,” Fraser said decades later, still bruised by their rejection. They deserved no credit for saving Cumberland, he argued. It was only Lucy’s trust and the Georgia Supreme Court that kept them from raping the island for timber and titanium.

There was one other unsung hero in the national seashore saga—and this time it wasn’t an island woman, but a rural county clerk named Edwin “Fats” Godley.

In order for the national seashore bill to be signed into law, Congress needed the support of the local Camden County board of commissioners, and time was running out. The five-person board was divided: two supported the national seashore, two were on the fence, and one boisterous commissioner was loudly opposed to it. He was dead-set on a bridge connecting Cumberland to the mainland. “No bridge, no deal,” he told Representative Bill Stuckey, who was championing the national seashore bill in Congress.

“That session of Congress had just about ended,” Stuckey recalled. “Either the bill went through or you could kiss it goodbye.”

So Congressman Stuckey arranged to meet with the commissioners over dinner and drinks. He also extended an invitation to the county clerk, Fats Godley. During the five-course meal, the congressman guffawed with the commissioners and swapped hunting stories while dining on straight-from-the-net seafood. Then, just before dessert, the congressman excused himself to the restroom. On cue, Fats Godley invited the commissioner opposed to the bill over to the bar in the adjoining room. There he bought the commissioner several vodka shots. Within a few minutes, the wobbly commissioner could barely keep his head off the bar. Meanwhile, Congressman Stuckey had returned to pitch the seashore bill to the two undecided commissioners.