BRUNSWICK, Ga. — For years, First Coast News has reported on the growing pains of home building in the region. With a booming population, many forests are being cut down for new subdivisions.
But a man in Glynn County is bucking the trend and saying "no" to large-scale development with the hopes of preserving nature and the history behind one specific plot of land.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the wealthiest people in America flocked to Jekyll Island. Luxurious homes were built and a select group of those wealthy people, including Major League Baseball owners and future Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, bought land west of Brunswick for a hunting and campsite called Cabbage Bluff and Dover Hall Plantation.
In 1915, those original baseball owners had designs to turn the land into the home of spring training for the entire league.
More than 100 years later, Joe McDonough owns the 3-thousand-acre parcel of land. He's ready to sell, but not in the way you may think.
McDonough and his business partner bought the property 20 years ago with a plan to create what they called "New Brunswick", essentially a whole new city in Glynn County.
"This new development would have been more homes than would have been in the entire city limits of Brunswick," said McDonough.
During the course of their planning, they changed their mind after being approached by environmental groups like the Sierra Club.
"This is where the fresh water meets the salt water, so the confluence of those two deals adds to the habitat of the surrounding marshes," said McDonough. "The cedars, the palms, circumnavigate the property on the water line and as soon as you get a little inland you pick up the live oak and the pine and other large trees."
A fan of the outdoors himself, McDonough and his business partner had a plan to maintain the property for its original intent of a private hunting and camping site while still allowing nature to thrive.
"We split the property up to 10 different conservation easements, so we can have 10 different sales," said McDonough, who added that while the land is totally undeveloped, it does have entitlements for water, sewer and zoning.
The idea of "New Brunswick" is gone, but select homes could be built.
"The sales can also be to multiple people where you get family members to come in and they buy a piece for legacy," said McDonough, "so they could have a 300-acre piece on the coast, and with that 300-acre piece in conservation they also get a 5-acre piece to build their home."
Aside from the historical baseball significance of this land once being owned by people like Ty Cobb and a list of MLB owners including Charles Comiskey and Captain T.L. Huston as well as American League President Ban Johnson, it's the extreme rarity of this large of a piece of undeveloped land that makes this extra special.
"There's very little bit of property left on the East Coast, I'm talking from Key West all the way to New York where you could take a parcel and create a family legacy with it and build generational wealth that is passed on for generations to come," said McDonough.
A slice of nature, steeped in history and available in the Golden Isles of Coastal Georgia.
Cabbage Bluff and Dover Hall Plantation is listed by Lori Bembry Weldon of Jon Kohler & Associates firm and Trish Sigman of Music Properties Group. More information about the property can be found on their website.