The lighthouse that has stood sentry over the north end of Little Cumberland Island for nearly 200 years, the seemingly impregnable white brick tower rising 60 feet, is in danger of tumbling into the sea.
Waves fueled by exceedingly high tides, and the inexorable rise of the Atlantic Ocean by a warming Earth, have suddenly eroded away large chunks of the island’s north-facing beach. At high tide, the beach in front of the lighthouse’s protective dune disappears.
“If we have two more years back to back like this year, it will be gone by the third year,” said James Holland, the former Altamaha Riverkeeper and an ardent environmentalist.
Scientists are only slightly less pessimistic. They predict it’ll be five, maybe 10 years before the ocean is lapping at the building’s foundation.
Virtually everybody agrees, though, that it would be a shame to lose such an iconic and historic structure that, long after its Fresnel light had dimmed, still guided mariners around the tricky shoals of St. Andrew Sound and the entranceway to the Satilla River. The lighthouse, after all, bore witness to slave ships and Union gunboats, the earthquake of 1886 and numerous founderings of ships and sailors in the nearby sea.
Dark these past 100 years, the lighthouse nonetheless evokes a mixture of pride and proprietorship and a reminder of a maritime era gone by.
“People will be very upset on the island if it falls into the ocean,” said Paula Eubanks, an ex-Atlantan who lives full-time on privately owned Little Cumberland. “It’s just an important part of island culture and lore.”
A guide to history
Georgia’s 100-mile coastline was once home to 15 lighthouses guiding mariners around and through the barrier islands and shifting shoals stretching from Savannah to Florida. Today, five remain and only three — on St. Simons, Sapelo and Tybee islands — still flash their lights.
The federal government, a burgeoning maritime power, bought 6 acres on Little Cumberland’s northern tip in 1837 for $500. A Bostonian, Joseph Hastings, built the brick tower and the lightkeeper’s quarters for $8,025. He placed 14 oil-filled lanterns and reflectors atop the tower, which began operating in 1838, according to the national historic registry and other sources. The light could be seen 14.5 miles out to sea.
David Thompson was the lighthouse’s first keeper, serving 11 years and earning $400 annually in the lonely, mostly boring job leavened by brief periods of high drama. New England whalers came south each winter in search of the leviathans. Freighters hauled cotton, rice, guano, wood, rum and naval stores through the bustling ports of Brunswick and Darien.
The slave trade, although outlawed in 1808, continued to draw British schooners across the Atlantic that surreptitiously disgorged their cargo onto the barriers islands and inlets along Georgia’s southern coast. James Clubb, a lighthouse keeper, piloted the Wanderer and 409 slaves, believed to be the nation’s last slave ship, onto nearby Jekyll Island in 1858.
Clubb witnessed Union frigates and Rebel blockade runners during the Civil War. A brick wall was built around the tower in 1867 as a bulwark against “encroachment by the sea,” the historic application reads. The head keeper received a new home in 1881; the assistant keeper’s dwelling was restored two years later.
August Haine, the assistant keeper, was on duty Aug. 31, 1886, when the deadly Charleston, S.C., earthquake shook the tower, cracked plaster and loosened the jalousie window panes. Storms of a more traditional nature wracked ships and took lives. In 1915, the Rambler got stuck on a nearby sandbar as the wind howled and the waves crashed. All aboard perished.
The lighthouse was decommissioned by Congress in 1913 and sold, along with 6 acres, to a Brunswick businessman for $800. A private homeowners group, the Little Cumberland Island Association, bought the 2,200-acre island in 1961 and set aside most of it as wilderness. A few dozen homes, hidden mostly below the oaks, cypress, myrtles and pines, have since been built.
In 1968, the two derelict lightkeepers’ abodes were torn down. Private money restored the lighthouse and afforded a spiral wooden staircase. First, though, workers had to dig through a drifting sand dune that covered up the entryway. In 1989, the lighthouse was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It remains off-limits to the public.
“All U.S. lighthouses are worthy of preservation, and the Cumberland Island light is no exception,” said Buddy Sullivan, a coastal historian who wrote “The Lighthouses of Georgia” in 1999. “They are the most visible and tangible symbols of America’s long and sustained maritime heritage and the role shipping and sea power has played in the development and growth of the nation.”
Elements take a toll
Sand dunes and barrier islands get pushed around by Mother Nature. A storm digs an inlet into a beach where one previously didn't exist. The moon's gravitational pull sends tides, such as the recent king tides that inundated coastal Georgia, further inland. Rising sea levels, fueled by a warming planet and melting ice caps, eat steadily away at beaches and dunes.
The sand between the Cumberland light and St. Andrew Sound piled up over the past few decades, obscuring about two-thirds of the lighthouse behind dunes and wind-swept pines. Some of coastal Georgia’s tallest sand dunes, up to 40 feet, line the island’s north end and protect the lighthouse. The ocean, though, is encroaching at an alarming rate.
Chester Jackson Jr., an assistant professor of geology at Georgia Southern University, studies shoreline vulnerability and has extensively modeled the erosion and accretion of the sand and the dunes on Little Cumberland’s north end.
“Over the past few years the changes have been quite dramatic in terms of erosion,” he said. “Something in the past year seems to have exacerbated the erosion along the edge of the dunes that are protecting the lighthouse.”
Jackson, a member of the state’s coastal advisory council, says erosion gobbles between 3 and 9 feet of beach each year. A whopping 30 feet of beach disappeared last year alone (as measured during high tide). Even a layman can see, from photos, how the tides are now eating away the base of the dune.
“If conditions were to persist, in terms of erosion, storm conditions and elevated high tides, we’re looking at five, 10 years before the base of the that lighthouse would be potentially exposed,” Jackson warned.
The lighthouse conjures the Morris Island Lighthouse off Folly Beach that guards Charleston’s harbor. The South Carolina lighthouse once stood a mile inland. Today the 161-foot tower is surrounded by water and leans slightly. More than $5 million has been spent stabilizing the lighthouse with a steel cofferdam, large stones and pilings.
Jackson expects the erosion near Little Cumberland’s lighthouse to slow a bit. The trees above the dune, and their roots inside it, will hold the sand together better. Or maybe not. One big storm, or another monstrous king tide, could topple the dune, and its lighthouse, into the sea.
“I’ll go away for a few days and when I come back I’ll see that large pieces of dune have fallen down onto the beach,” said Eubanks, a former Georgia State professor. “It’s just shocking how much the north end is eroding. The sand is moving faster than I’ve ever seen it.”
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