page_title: Cumberland Island
section_title: The Carnegie Family Era
hierarchical_section_title: Cumberland Island / The plantation era / The Carnegie Family Era
caption_attribution_description: English: Dungeness mansion — on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Prior to damage from the 1959 fire. 1958 image: Historic American Buildings Survey of Georgia (U.S. state). Français&#160;: Dungeness Mansion, Cumberland Island, Géorgie, États-Unis, avant les dégâts d’incendie
context_page_description: 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 Park and a National Seashore. Little Cumberland Island is connected to the main island by a marsh. John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were married in the First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island in 1996.
context_section_description: In the 1880s Thomas M. Carnegie, brother of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and his wife Lucy bought land on Cumberland for a winter retreat.  In 1884, they began building a mansion on the site of Dungeness, though Carnegie never lived to see its completion. Lucy and their nine children continued to live on the island, naming their mansion Dungeness after that of Greene. Dungeness was designed as a 59-room Scottish castle. They also built pools, a golf course, and 40 smaller buildings to house the 200 servants who worked at the mansion. The last time Dungeness was used was for the 1929 wedding of a Carnegie daughter. After the Crash and the Great Depression, the family left the island and kept the mansion vacant.  It burned in a 1959 fire, believed to have been started by a poacher who had been shot in the leg by a caretaker weeks before. Today, the ruins of the mansion remain on the southern end of the island. The Carnegie family owned 90% of the island.
  Lucy Carnegie had additional estates built on the island for her children.  These include:
  Greyfield, built in 1900, now a private inn owned by the Carnegie family.
  Plum Orchard, donated to the National Park Service in 1972, which maintains it and gives daily tours.
  Stafford Plantation, privately owned by members of the Carnegie family. The caretaker of the estate (nearby homes and an air-strip) and his family live in the residence.
caption: Dungeness Mansion prior to 1959 fire on Cumberland Island National Seashore
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