High Point-Half Moon Bluff Historic District

At the north end of Cumberland Island, Georgia, this district combines two building groups, three archeological sites and an archeological zone. Half Moon Bluff grew from a tract divided into 42 lots in the early 1890s and sold to Black residents, many of them former slaves. A log church and school was built in 1893, and the present First African Baptist Church dates to 1937. Nearby cemeteries hold members of the founding families. To the south, High Point began about 1880 as a hotel and cottage resort reached by a mule-drawn tramway from Cumberland Wharf. It later served as a hunting and fishing club and then became the Candler family estate, with a New House added in 1940. Shell middens on Terrapin Point reflect long aboriginal use, and tradition places Fort St. Andrews, founded in 1736 under Oglethorpe, there. Together the sites illustrate post-Civil War Black settlement, island leisure and colonial defense.