Throughout the entire South, there is no place quite like Georgia’s Cumberland Island. It is almost poetic in its wildness, its waves echo against the shoreline with the whispered rhythm of a seagull’s wings, its great palmettos and oaks sway and sing in cadence with the ocean breezes of the nearby Atlantic.

Reached only by private boat, private ferry from Fernandina Beach, Florida, or public ferry from St. Marys, Georgia, a historic waterfront town that is nearest the island, Cumberland is the epitome of natural beauty. Just less than eighteen miles long and only three miles wide, the diminutive island’s history and splendor are as deeply rooted as its mélange of forests.

Stepping on Cumberland Island is like stepping into the pages of a nature book. The largest and southernmost of Georgia’s barrier islands, Cumberland’s thick, unbroken canopy of treetops stretches across the island like tatted lace, hiding a cache of nature’s secrets: painted buntings, vibrant and jewel-like, flitting among the live oaks; raccoons skittering after fiddler crabs; armadillos sunning themselves on a sandy knoll; whitetail deer nibbling on a bed of clover; maybe even a bobcat shadowing its next meal of an unsuspecting field mouse.

This is where quietness reigns, with the silence punctuated only occasionally by the bellow of an alligator, the high pitch of a passenger plane as it streams its way across the sky, or the clip-clopping and whinnying of a herd of feral horses, considered an exotic species on the island. The horses, along with a few feral pigs, were once a part of the plantation system of the island, but either escaped their pens or were completely abandoned by their owners. They have since bred outside of domestication, and upwards of 250 horses roamed Cumberland at one time or another.

The island’s topography, ideal for growing sea island cotton, indigo, and yellow pine during the “plantation era” before the Civil War, is diverse and divided into three separate phases: the salt marsh of its western end, the maritime forest—characterized by live oak and palmetto—that dominates it center, and the eastern beach.

The salt marsh, at first glance a not much more than a prairie of tall grasses striated with tidal rivers, comes alive with the quick movement of river otters, fat-beaked pelicans, slithery cottonmouth moccasins, and fiddler crabs. At daybreak, the marsh glows with all of the glorious colors of a tequila sunrise: pale pink, brilliant red, and subtle orange. The sunsets are even more magical; the marsh seems afire as it simmers and burns in golden shards of light. (CONTINUE...)