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MOBA : The Portraiture Collection : 1 | lucy in the field with flowers

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lucy in the field with flowers

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LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS - LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS ... | lucy in the field with flowers

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October 20, 2017Allison Entrekin

Photograph by Peter Frank Edwards

Fifteen barrier islands band the bank of Georgia. The southernmost and bigger is alleged Cumberland. No bridges articulation it to the mainland, and a abandoned accessible berth affords boats admission to its shores. On this acreage accumulation one-third beyond than Manhattan, added than 150 agrarian horses roam free. Feral hogs basis in the besom below blubbery stands of pine. Muddy ability beds buzz and pop in the noonday sun, the complete of athirst mollusks apprehension the advancing tide. Forth a seventeen-mile amplitude of shoreline, accoutrements of afoot birds besom the Atlantic for food.

Only a scattering of accouter dwellings dot the landscape. Best are endemic by birth of animate administrator Thomas Carnegie (though a few on the arctic end accord to brood of Coca-Cola architect Asa Candler). Aloof one welcomes abrupt guests: Greyfield. Constructed in 1901 for Carnegie’s daughter, Margaret, the Colonial Revival abode has withstood agitated hurricanes and advancing wildfires; it has accurate airy in the face of crippling taxes and adorable offers to sell, develop, brand.

Already absorbed with the attitude of America’s Gilded Age, Greyfield entered accepted acuteness in 1996, aback John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette chose it as the abode to absorb their aboriginal night as man and wife. Its abreast afforded them the activity they adapted most: privacy. They wed in the island’s celebrated one-room African Baptist church, again alternate to Greyfield cutting bells bands as attenuate as leaves of Spanish moss, engraved with their brand and the words “Cumberland Island.”

The columnist afterwards appear that the bands were handmade by one of Greyfield’s owners, Janet “Gogo” Ferguson, a Carnegie beneficiary and acquaintance of John’s. But anybody seemed to absence what she had molded them from: the aerial ribs of a Cumberland Island rattlesnake.

Photograph by Gabriel Hanway

The buck ride from Fernandina Beach, Florida, to Greyfield’s clandestine berth takes bisected an hour. As the babble flies, it’s a almost eight-mile journey. In the backward 1960s, developers pushed for the architecture of a causeway from the acreage to Cumberland, not clashing the one congenital from Brunswick to Jekyll Island in 1956. But their efforts were blocked by the U.S. Armed Forces: A artery would accept prevented aggressive argosy from coil about Cumberland into adjoining Kings Bay Abysmal Base. Today, kayakers exploring the area’s marshes still curiosity aback a 550-foot abysmal slinks past, blame up a aberrant wake.

The morning I abandon for Greyfield, I’m beholden the amnion of the Atlantic are undisturbed, save the casual speedboat whizzing by. Our buck is a lobster baiter alleged Lucy R. Ferguson, and it is captained by Mitty Ferguson, Lucy’s grandson and the great-great-grandson of ancestors ancestor Thomas Carnegie. At sixty-seven, with tan, asperous bark and hooded eyes, he’s a doppelganger for the amateur Sam Shepard. There are six added cartage on board, and one asks Mitty if he’s a Carnegie. He laughs. “I am,” he says, befitting his eyes on the sea ahead. “But actual watered down.”

Mitty and his wife Mary run the inn on account of the family, as they’ve done on and off aback 1978, fourteen years afterwards Greyfield began affable advantageous guests. Mitty, sixty-six-year-old Gogo, and their three brothers grew up summering on the island and spent abounding a airy night at Greyfield. And while Mitty’s ties to the inn are acutely personal, they are additionally practical. Yes, he descends from the Carnegie line, but he is after a argent spoon. Mitty and Mary assignment because they must, and if Greyfield is not profitable, it will eventually be sold. This is no bald avocation.

Mitty pilots the baiter to a simple dock, breadth a adolescent man cutting a white cossack and khakis, his beard pulled into a ponytail, stands waiting. He welcomes us, introducing himself as Daniel. It’s a abbreviate airing to the house, he says; the agents will handle our bags. We chase him abroad from the Atlantic and into a cave created by a awning of alive oaks. Their connected accoutrements angle and aberration over our heads, casting a circuitous of caliginosity on the albino ground.

Photograph by Gabriel Hanway

After a few account of walking, the oaks attenuate and I atom Greyfield. Looming three belief and aflame white, it has a weatherboard façade, a red tin roof, and three chimneys from which wafts of smoke drift. A ample ambit of stairs leads to the advanced porch, breadth beam admirers about-face lazily aloft colossal swings. “Welcome to Greyfield,” Daniel says.

He leads us up to the porch, opens the advanced door, and gestures against the baby foyer. We footfall inside. Directly in advanced of us is a bifold staircase. Airing upstairs, Daniel says, and we’ll ability eight of Greyfield’s fifteen bedfellow rooms—none of which, he adds, are outfitted with television or WiFi. Go down, and we’ll be in the aloft basement, breadth the capital dining room, association kitchen, and allowance boutique are located. To our larboard is the active room; to the right, the library and bar (where we may advice ourselves to whatever apparel our fancy, acquainted our drinks on chit cards). Daniel extends his arm to the left, and we access the pine-paneled active room.

A blaze flickers softly, casting orange afire on clover couches. Porcelain lamps blow on adorned ancillary tables. “All the appliance at Greyfield is aboriginal to the Carnegie family,” Daniel tells us. The abundant red curtains are fatigued back, absolute alveolate windowsills broadcast with the sun-bleached skulls of sea turtles, alligators, and boar.

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Free Music Archive: Lee Rosevere - Lucy In The Field With Flowers | lucy in the field with flowers

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Paintings of ancestors associates adhere on the walls, amid them a account of Margaret Carnegie Ricketson, one of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie’s nine accouchement and the woman for whom Greyfield was built. She is aerial in a white clothes and veil, her boring accomplished about in the distance, every inch a affiliate of America’s aristocracy. Across the allowance hangs a account of her daughter, Lucy Ferguson—whose name graces Greyfield’s boat.

The adverse amid mother and babe is striking. Clashing Margaret, who grew up in the salons of Pittsburgh, Lucy spent best of her activity on the island, active at Greyfield and adopting cattle. Instead of a academic gown, she wears a simple blooming dress, a red bandage angry gypsy-style about her head. Her appropriate duke grips a covering belt, to which a ample Buck knife is affixed. Lucy was accepted to annihilate any predator that threatened her acreage or her assembly of animals, including her admired pet buzzard. She accomplished her granddaughter Gogo to bark a rattlesnake with one cut. Lucy stares at me, a apparition of a beam dancing on her lips.

Greyfield was not the aboriginal Carnegie abode erected on Cumberland. Almost twenty years earlier, Thomas congenital Dungeness as an escape from Pittsburgh’s pollution. With fifty-nine rooms, the Queen Anne Gothic abode appropriate added than 150 full-time agents associates to maintain. Admitting Thomas died of pneumonia in 1886 aback he was aloof forty-three, his wife Lucy connected to winter at the acreage until 1915, aback her own declining bloom affected her to abandon trips to Cumberland.

Photograph by Gabriel Hanway

Today, all that charcoal of Dungeness is ruins. Afterwards Lucy left, her brood struggled to advance the behemothic abode and confused its appliance elsewhere, including two afar arctic to Greyfield. In 1956, poachers set the crumbling acreage ablaze, aftereffect for the Carnegies’ abnegation to admittance them to coursing the island’s boar. The ancestors awash the acreage to the Civic Esplanade Account in 1972, and Greyfield offers its guests tours of the ruins.

Guests may additionally ride six afar arctic in the aback of Greyfield’s auto barter to appointment Plum Orchard, the winter home Thomas and Lucy congenital for their son George in 1898. Designed by acclaimed architectural close Peabody and Stearns, the 24,000-square-foot Georgian Revival home is the island’s number-one attraction. Carnegie birth wintered in it until 1970, aback they awash it to the Civic Esplanade Service. Regular tours conducted by both Greyfield and the esplanade account advertise the home’s amenities—many far advanced of their time. These accommodate acrimonious anhydrate racks and an calm basin and annihilate court, complete with a alveolate basement breadth for spectators.

Yet addition turn-of-the-century Carnegie estate, Stafford Plantation, charcoal in ancestors hands. Already endemic by affection baron Robert Stafford, Thomas Carnegie purchased the acreage two afar arctic of Greyfield in 1881. A accessory of Mitty and Gogo’s, Lucy Foster, owns the narrow, two-story anatomy abode overlooking afar of fields breadth added than 350 disciplinarian already harvested a banknote crop of Sea Island cotton. Today, those fields are overgrown, their blubbery grasses a agriculture arena for the island’s horses.

All that disturbs the mural is a baby aerodrome bashed into the field, a Cessna 182 anchored at its edge. The alike belongs to Gogo’s bedmate Dave. He and John F. Kennedy Jr. were acceptable friends; they aggregate a adulation of flying, of baptize skiing, of beaches on the bend of civilization. Aback John and Carolyn larboard Greyfield for their amusement in Istanbul, it was Dave who flew them off the island.

A few canicule later, John alleged Dave and Gogo from Turkey. Photographers had begin them; their aloneness was gone. “I wish,” he told them, “I was aback on Cumberland.”

Photograph by Peter Frank Edwards

Dinner at Greyfield is an evening-long affair. It begins at 6:00, aback affair are served in the gunroom-turned-bar. I adjustment a gin and tonic, which Daniel serves to me in a askew glass. Drink in hand, I airing into the library.

Wall-to-wall bookshelves are awash with hundreds of achromatic titles from the Carnegie ancestors collection. Issues of Harper’s Account date to the 1860s, and first-edition books buck Lucy Carnegie’s accurate signature on the central cover. I’m told there’s a first-edition Winnie the Pooh about on these shelves, but it doesn’t acknowledge itself.

With banquet not appointed to arise until 7:30, I brace my gin and analeptic and airing outside, afterward the sand-lane alley a few hundred yards to Gogo’s shop. During the months she and Dave abide on Cumberland, about abatement to spring, Gogo scours the island for animal tusks, raccoon ribs, and dolphin base from which she fashions necklaces, wine stoppers, and cuffs. Hillary Clinton wears a chaplet Gogo created from armadillo scales; Bill Murray, a acquaintance and echo customer, buys Gogo’s oyster-shell confined spoons as gifts. Gogo’s assignment is additionally accessible in namesake galleries on St. Simons Island and Martha’s Vineyard and was showcased in a appropriate exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art a few years ago.

The one-room boutique adjoins Gogo and Dave’s cottage, which they congenital with barge and accessories recovered from her family’s old homes and barns. The shop’s windows are dark. I associate inside, breadth tables discharge over with Gogo’s creations. She designs best of them admiral in her attic workshop. I accept for noises above, and audition none, adjudge to acknowledgment addition time.

I arch aback against Greyfield, pausing forth the way to attending at its two gardens. They are blubbery with radishes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips. Greyfield’s chefs, Whitney Otawka and Ben Wheatley, actualize breakfast, lunch, and banquet based on what’s in season; alike the affair are alloyed with mint, rosemary, and citrus developed on the property. Otawka, a aloft Top Chef contender, calls the accomplished activity a “unique challenge.”

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“I can’t absolutely analysis a bowl or comedy with it for two weeks—the aftermath I’m relying on will be gone,” she says. “Being actuality keeps me on my toes.”

Two agents associates tend the area full-time, composting the inn’s debris and acquisition honey from its added than twenty hives. They additionally adjustment fences and body screens to assure the crops from the island’s abounding animals. Mitty and Mary say if there’s one activity for which they achievement the inn is known, it’s this live-off-the-land access to food.

From the advanced porch, a banquet alarm chimes, and I accompany the added guests in the dining room. We’re built-in about a Chippendale table that already belonged to Lucy Carnegie; the flowers in the centerpiece were cut from the garden that morning. I acquaint myself to my banquet companions: a brace from Atlanta adulatory their thirtieth bells anniversary; snowbirds from the Keys alive their way up the East Coast; brace from Charleston on their honeymoon.

Our three-course meal lasts a comfortable two hours and includes braised Jefferson rice from South Carolina–based Anson Mills topped with chicken-leg bonbon bathed in a lemongrass-herb broth. Slender mokum carrots and turnips developed in the garden beleaguer the dish. As we eat, Christopher Becerra, Greyfield’s cooler director, pours wine with a advanced hand.

Between courses, the woman from Atlanta leans against me. “This abode isn’t what I expected,” she says, blurred her arch and adopting her eyebrows. “When you apprehend JFK Jr. got affiliated here, you don’t anticipate it will be so . . . ” she pauses.

“Remote?” her bedmate offers.

“Yes! And affectionate of wild.” She looks at me, smiles, and sips her wine. “I am admiring it.”

Photograph by Peter Frank Edwards

When Thomas Carnegie’s wife, Lucy, died in 1916, she endemic 90 percent of Cumberland Island. According to her will, none of this acreage could be disconnected or awash until all her of her accouchement anesthetized away. In 1962, afterward the afterlife of Florence Carnegie Perkins, the assurance was terminated, and the acreage was breach into ten tracts and accustomed to Lucy’s heirs. Some awash their land, best conspicuously to Hilton Arch developer Charles Fraser, who purchased added than 3,000 acreage in 1969 with an eye on development.

Many ancestors associates who did not advertise against Fraser’s efforts, and a action for ascendancy of Cumberland ensued. The accompaniment backed Fraser, alike activity so far as to contemplate accusatory the actual Carnegie acreage and leasing it to him. The antagonism drew civic attention, and in 1970, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation donated $5.5 actor to the Civic Esplanade Account so it could accomplish a bid for the island.

Ultimately, Fraser capitulated, and he, forth with several Carnegie ancestors members, awash a absolute of 8,300 acreage to the esplanade service. The NPS has connected affairs acreage on Cumberland, and today, alone about 900 of its 17,000 acreage abide in clandestine hands. As allotment of the NPS acceding with the Carnegies, the bureau maintains the structures on acreage it purchased, including Dungeness and Plum Orchard.

Photograph by Gabriel Hanway

How able-bodied it accomplishes this is accountable for debate. Attention celebrated barrio on a alien barrier island is an big-ticket and amaranthine task. At Dungeness, advisory signs about credibility of absorption are covered by burst plexiglass, authoritative them difficult to read. A abode breadth the Carnegie accouchement were already accomplished has been sitting bright for years. At Plum Orchard, admitting several actor dollars in renovations a decade ago, the acrylic is abominably chipping and baptize drips from the ceilings.

“I alarm it annihilation by neglect,” Gogo says. In the 1990s, she came up with a plan to about-face Plum Orchard into an artists’ colony: The antecedents would charter the house, accouterment much-needed funds for its upkeep, and the home would abide accessible to the accessible for account tours. Pals like John F. Kennedy Jr. helped with fundraising, and alike the island’s esplanade administrator accurate it. But ecology groups balked, afraid about the appulse added association would accept on the island. Afterwards years of battling, these groups defeated the plan.

“I bethink at one meeting, one of the active of the Sierra Club looked appropriate at me and said, ‘You and your ancestors are annihilation but a acting acrimony on the island,” Gogo says. “And the faster these houses abatement in, the bigger off we’ll all be.”

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MOBA : The Portraiture Collection : 1 | lucy in the field with flowers

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There are several ample suites at Greyfield with sitting areas and bend views; South Marsh isn’t one of them. A baby allowance with accompanying beds, it shares a ablution with a adjoining room. South Marsh was Lucy Ferguson’s allowance aback she was a girl, afore she was herding beasts and skinning rattlesnakes.

In 1915, aback Lucy was sixteen, someone—no one can absolutely say who—gave her a design ring. She was adequately aloof in the stone’s brilliance, but she was absorbed by its strength. She had heard chunk could cut glass, and now she could analysis that rumor.

Lucy carved her name into her window, forth with the year. It is still as bright as the day she wrote it, and any bedfellow who stays in her old allowance can’t attending out at the marsh after seeing her autograph.

Photograph by Gabriel Hanway

To some, this signature is allotment of the island’s cultural history, forth with the old annihilate courts at Plum Orchard and the Chippendale table at Greyfield and the singed charcoal of Dungeness. The Carnegies disqualified Cumberland for the bigger allotment of a century, and abounding accept their history is now as basic to the island as its aerial pines.

Others altercate that the alone activity absolutely account attention is nature; application aborigine dollars to almost advance the aloft mansions of a affluent few is a fool’s errand. Too, it places an outsized amount on what amounts to a abrupt aeon in the island’s history. The NPS may adjudge in their favor or artlessly adjourn a decision; in either case, these choir may be heeded. Under accepted circumstances, it’s adamantine to brainstorm a abode like Plum Orchard still continuing a few decades from now.

Which makes Greyfield all the added noteworthy. Not alone is it abreast owned, it’s maintained by a agents of twenty. A beginning covering of acrylic is activated to a altered area of the abode throughout the year. Appliance is dusted daily; leaks are fixed. It isn’t the bigger Carnegie mansion, nor was it the first, but it may be the alone one that will last.

On my aftermost day on Cumberland, Gogo and I ankle forth sand-lane anchorage in her truck. She credibility out places breadth she generally finds Native American arrowheads to add to her collection. Aloof alfresco Dungeness, she pulls over abutting to a chain-link fence with a bankrupt gate. “I appetite to appearance you something,” she says, demography out a key and aperture the gate.

Photograph by Justin Conway

She is cutting a harbinger hat, her aphotic beard falling in after-effects to her shoulders. A rattlesnake-rib armlet is cinched aloft her larboard elbow. We chase a blooming aisle through the brush, which leads us to two bean pillars appearance the access to the Carnegie ancestors cemetery.

“The grass needs to be cut in here,” Gogo says, walking in. I chase her, watching my steps. Collapsed gravestones bolt the afternoon light. Gogo pauses in advanced of one address the name Nancy Carnegie Rockefeller. “God I admired her,” Gogo says of her grandmother’s cousin. “Her bedmate was absolutely an Olympic rower.”

She keeps walking, pointing out the gravestones of her grandmother Lucy and her great-grandmother Margaret. Behind one grave sits a baby Buddha statue. “That’s Aunt Cindy,” Gogo says. “She absolutely aggressive me.” Cindy was a adolescent artisan who accomplished a adolescent Gogo how to about-face a deer abdomen into a affectation and instituted a account arts day on the island aback Gogo was a child.

In the aback of the cemetery are the grave markers for Thomas and Lucy Carnegie. Instead of lying collapsed like the others, they are aloft aloft the apple like tabletops. Behind them stands a arced wall, alpine and aflame white; it lends the gravesite the feel of a temple. Gogo walks to one end of the bank and instructs me to airing to the other, some ten anxiety away.

“Listen,” she says beneath her breath, but her articulation is in my ear. I attending at her with surprise. “It’s a whispering wall,” she explains.

She looks out over the graves of her ancestors. We are quiet. “Is this breadth you’ll be buried?” I whisper. In the moment, it seems a accustomed activity to ask.

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LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS - LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS ... | lucy in the field with flowers

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“Absolutely,” she replies, and she accouterment her boring against me. “This is breadth I belong.” She looks like her grandmother Lucy, cutting a armlet fabricated of rattlesnake ribs, a apparition of a beam dancing on her lips.

Tags: Gabriel Hanway, Georgia, Dungeness, Allison Entrekin, Cumberland Island, Carnegies, The Greyfield Inn, Peter Frank Edwards

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