Islomanes of Cumberland Island

Review\n"From the Timucuan Indians to Civil War heroes to steel magnates and beyond, the challenges and triumphs of the island come to life in page after page of discovery. [...] Islomanes of Cumberland Island is an easy read and one to get lost in. [...] Through this book, you will come to know for sure why Cumberland was saved for future generations and the meaning of this preservation for all Americans."
-Barbara Ryan Harris, St. Marys Magazine\n"Islomanes of Cumberland Island is more than a history. It's a love story.
It's the story of the love of a woman and her daughter for Cumberland Island—its seclusion, its unspoiled beaches, even its wilderness, in which the relics of its past are inexorably vanishing. They love Cumberland Island also for its fabled wild horses. The horses, which are the island's principal attraction for most tourists, represent in all their wild beauty both the glory and the precariousness of nature, for in their freedom to roam, the horses are a disaster to the fragile ecosystem of the island and may someday have to be removed from the island.
And the history I was looking for? Bourke's telling of the history of Cumberland Island evolves naturally from the discoveries, during her and her daughter's annual, adventurous visits, of the remnants of its glory days. And as it turns out, it is in this gradual unveiling of the mysteries of the island's remarkable and poignant history that much of the book's fasciation lies. [...]
Islomanes of Cumberland Island is a charming book. It captivates, fascinates, and enchants."
-Cynthia Williams, Writer and Independent Journalist\nLucy Carnegie, wife of industrialist Thomas Carnegie, dreamed of creating on Cumberland Island a home where her children would be safe from the smoke and soot-filled skies over Pittsburgh. Protected by the waters of the Cumberland Sound, the estate she built encompassed nearly the entire island. It was a perfect world, until the outside world intruded. Stone by stone it all came tumbling down. Wild horses now crop the grass around the burnt-out mansion. Rattlesnakes nest among the ruins.\nA century later, another family comes to Cumberland to walk among the horses and to accept what gifts the island has to offer: solitude, unspoiled wilderness, and wildlife free to roam undisturbed. Returning year after year, Rhamy and her parents explore the island and swim in the ocean. They picnic on the beach where servants once served champagne, shrimp cocktails, and crab cakes to the Carnegie family and their guests. They gaze at the chimneys surrounding Stafford house, all that remain of slave quarters that once housed plantation field hands. They mourn for Zabette, daughter of a plantation owner and his black servant, sold to a man who fathered her six children, then abandoned her. Always, everywhere on the island, the horses graze nearby, unaware of efforts by environmentalists to remove them from the island where they have lived for centuries.\nTraveling to the north end of the island, the family sits for a quiet moment in the church where JFK Jr. married Carolyn Bessette. Across the pasture is the shack where naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel has lived for fifty years and the porch where her lover lay dead, shot through the heart.\nIn the campgrounds, on the beach, at the Dungeness dock, wild horses graze. For now, they are safe.\nRita Welty Bourke is the author of Kylie’s Ark: The Making of a Veterinarian. She’s a regular contributor to literary magazines, including The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, Black Warrior Review, and The North American Review. Married to songwriter Rory Michael Bourke, she’s the mother of three daughters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.\nFrom the Author\nMy family has been visiting Cumberland Island every spring for the last 15 years. That's what the book is about. That, and the wild horses, the Carnegie family (Thomas and Lucy, not Andrew) who once owned nearly the entire island, the biologist who