Built: 1838

Type: Conical Tower

Height: 60 feet

Status: Non-Active

Location: Little Cumberland Island

Deactivated: 1915

Lens: 1838 14 Lamps / 1857 Third Order Fresnel

Keepers: David Thompson (1838 - 1849)

Notes: Georgia's Atlantic Coast is protected by a string of barrier islands stretching from Florida to South Carolina. Cumberland Island is the southernmost of the islands and also the largest and longest. Little Cumberland Island lies just north of Cumberland Island, and is separated from the larger island by a marshy area formed by Christmas and Brockington Creeks. Both Cumberland islands have been home to a lighthouse. One has been relocated, and the other is now privately owned.
Cumberland Island received its lighthouse first. Six acres at the southern tip of the island were ceded to the U.S. Government in 1802 by the state of Georgia for the construction of a lighthouse. The lighthouse, built by Winslow Lewis, in 1820. After eighteen years of service, the lighthouse was dismantled brick by brick and reassembled on the northern end of Florida's Amelia Island, which lies just across the mouth of the St. Mary's River from the original lighthouse site. The lighthouse was able to better mark from the Florida side entrance of the river.
Before the relocation of the lighthouse, the decision was made to build a lighthouse on the northern end of Little Cumberland Island, where it could mark the entrance to St. Andrew Sound and the Satilla River. In fact, the lighthouse was known as the St. Andrew Lighthouse prior to the Civil War. In 1838, as one Cumberland lighthouse was shrinking at the southern end of the islands another lighthouse was rising at the northern end of the islands, just eighteen miles away. The tower survived the Civil War.
In the 1870s, a brick wall was built around the lighthouse to protect it from the encroaching sea. The lighthouse was in service until 1915 when it was deactivated. The Little Cumberland Island Association purchased the island in 1961, and decided that 90 percent of the island would be left as wilderness. The remaining ten percent of the island was divided into 100, two-acre lots where development is allowed, but only 36 homes have been built. 
The keeper's dwelling was destroyed in 1968, but the Little Cumberland Island Association has done much work to preserve the tower.  A large dune protects the lighthouse from the ocean, but as a result the tower is now barely visible from the water.  As the island is private, access to the Little Cumberland Lighthouse is not permitted. Little Cumberland Island is privately owned and is not open to the public.