Phineas Miller Nightingale
Biography
Cumberland Island
"Private Fastness: Tales Of Wild," CUMBERLAND ISLAND AND HOW MODERN TIMES AT LAST HAVE REACHED IT, William W. Winn, April 1972, Volume 23 Issue 3
Shortly after the American Revolution, a good part of Cumberland was bought by General Nathanael Greene, commander of American forces in the South at the end of the war. [See “Men of the Revolution—in” in the December, 1971, A MERICAN H ERITAGE .] In 1785, when Greene completed his purchase of almost the entire southern end of the island, Cumberland was still covered with large stands of virgin live oak and pine. The General wanted to timber the island, and he began logging operations immediately. He also drew up plans for an enormous mansion to be situated on the southern end of Cumberland, where Oglethorpe had built his hunting lodge. Greene planned to call the house Dungeness, after OgIethorpc’s lodge, and he intended the home to be a summer retreat for his large family, then living at Mulberry Grove Plantation on the Savannah River in mainland Georeria.
Greene was heavily in debt as the result of personally guaranteeing payment for his troop supplies in the closing days of the war, and he was struggling to reclaim old rice fields at Mulberry Grove and recoup his fortune when he died suddenly of a stroke in 1786. His widow, the beautiful and elegant Catherine, carried through her husband’s plans for Dungeness, and in 1803 moved her family (including a second husband) into the massive house that rose far above the trees at the south end of Cumberland. Dungeness was made of tabby (a concrete-like mixture of limestone and oyster shells), and it was truly enormous, containing thirty rooms and standing four stories high forty feet from the cellar sloncs with walls six feet thick at the base. There were four chimneys and sixteen fireplaces, and twenty rooms above the first floor. It was a tremendous and expensive undertaking for the time and the place, and the house was never finished. Someone invented the story that an old Greene family superstition forbade finishing the house, but the truth is that neither Catherine nor her second husband, Phineas Miller, ever had the money. The house was situated on a huge shell midden, and it was visible for miles. It became, almost immediately, one of the most famous plantation residences of the islands, an elegantly appointed house surrounded by an enclosed twelve-acre garden of tropical and semitropical plants, including crepe myrtle, sage palms, orange, clove, and fig trees, rubber plants, date palms, camphor and coffee trees, Portuguese laurel, guava, lime, citron, pomegranate, and many, many others. East of the house was a grove of eight hundred olive trees, and south, beyond the garden, a littie spit of land extended into the marsh where live oaks, festooned with Spanish moss, formed a natural canopy to shade out the hot Georgia sun. It was to this cool, relaxing spot, which the Greene children called the Park, that the family would retire at the end of the day.
All in all, Dungeness was an enchanting place, and Catherine Greene-Miller was a lavish hostess. Few weeks went by without at least two or three houseguests present. Kitty, as many of her friends called her, was a beautiful and sophisticated woman, a friend of many of the most illustrious patriots of the American Revolution. She was one of the handful of women who had borne the bitter winter at Valley Forge, gaining there the admiration and friendship not only of Washington but of Lafayette, Anthony Wayne, von Steuben, and Kosciusko as well. But no person as lovely and popular as Kitty Greene could long remain without enemies, and soon after General Greene died, she was linked romantically with Anthony—“Mad Anthony”—Wayne. The republican farmers of Georgia, who disliked Mrs. Greene for her aristocratic, federalist leanings, quickly spread the rumor that she and Wayne had been having an affair long before Greene died. Later the rumor was broadened to a version that had Kitty and Wayne murdering the General with a butcher knife.
But Catherine Greene was no murderess. She was a highly intelligent woman, strong-willed and accustomed to getting her way, yet accustomed also to hardships and disappointment. She had the knack of turning friendships—even casual ones—into extremely intimate relationships, and, of course, this was always interpreted in the basest physical terms by the local citizenry. Furthermore, Kitty was from Rhode Island, and most of her friends were Yankees, including Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin at Mulberry Grove in 1793. It was Catherine Greene who originally encouraged Whitney to work on the gin, and popular lore even credits her with a hand in the invention. When Whitney was perplexed over how to sweep the gin teeth clean, it is said that Mrs. Greene remarked, “Why Eli, you need a brush,” and flicked the lint from the teeth with her hairbrush.
It was Catherine’s second husband, Phineas Miller, who formed the illfated partnership with Whitney to manufacture and sell the gin. The innumerable lawsuits and trials of Miller & Whitney to protect their patent are too well-known to detail, but it was the frustration of dealing with the shrewd, unscrupulous backwoods Georgia farmers that led Whitney ultimately to observe: “I have a set of the most Depraved villains to combat and I might as well go to Hell in search of Happiness as apply to a Georgia Court for Justice.”
When his mind was on it, Phineas Miller was an excellent planter, and Dungeness cotton bloomed on the land, tended by more than a hundred slaves. Olive oil and perhaps some indigo added to the income of the family, which included five of Catherine’s children by General Greene and, in time, their families as well. But Miller died in 1803, and Catherine was once again left to manage the plantation and the increasingly complex financial affairs of the Greene-Miller estate. As she grew older, Catherine seems to have suffered from a progressively worsening nervous disorder, and the bitter rumors about her past were altered to suit the needs of the present. It was said that she was mean, immoral, that she drank too much, that she would think nothing of shooting a slave, and worse. When she died in September, 1814, she was not greatly mourned locally. She was buried in a little cemetery near a creek that winds through Dungeness. You may find her grave there today, shaded by the oaks and moss. Her tombstone reads:
In memory of Catharine Miller (widow of the late Major General Nathanael Greene, Commander in Chief of the American Revolutionary army in the Southern department in 1783) who died Sept. 22nd 1814 aged 59 years. She possessed great latents and exalted virtues.
After Kitty’s death, Dungeness passed to her daughter Louisa, a rather formidable woman not greatly beloved by her own family. The plantation now included a considerable grove of orange trees as well as cotton fields, and Louisa was a firm and efficient manager. She was in charge at Dungeness when the British, under Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, seized the island in January, 1815, a few weeks after the War of 1812 was officially brought to a close at Ghent, Belgium. Cockburn interrupted a house party, but aside from banishing the family and guests to the upstairs, he and his men seem to have gotten on well enough with the Americans.
In one of their raids against the mainland, the British captured the little port of St. Marys and gave birth to one of the most revered tales in south Georgia. It seems that the British held the Collector of the Port, Archibald Clark, under guard and demanded to be given any government funds he possessed. Mr. Clark patiently explained that he had none, but the British officers, somewhat suspicious, entered his home and searched about for the money. Alas, they encountered a defiant Mrs. Clark in the living room.
One of the officers, pointing to a pattern in the living room rug, asked Mrs. Clark: “Isn’t that the British Crown?”
To which Mrs. Clark, with an eye toward history, replied: “Yes, and you will see that it is underfoot.”
Eventually informed of the peace, and no doubt tired of the fruitless and costly sallies against the rather barren mainland (not to mention the sallies of Mrs. Clark), the British withdrew in February, 1815.
Three years later a hoary figure from out of the American Revolution made a descent on Cumberland. This was none other than Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, the implacable old soldier and friend of both Washington and General Greene. He arrived in ill health, set ashore with nothing but a dilapidated hair trunk and a cask of Madeira. Phineas Miller Nightingale, a nephew of Louisa’s, was playing near the Dungeness wharf when he saw the old gentleman being rowed ashore from a schooner out in the channel. Lee told the boy to go inform Louisa that “an old friend and companion of General Greene has come to die in the arms of his daughter.” The old man was true to his word. He died at Dungeness, apparently in some agony, on March 25, 1818. He was buried with full military honors provided by an American fleet stationed near the St. Marys. For many years his body rested in the same little cemetery with that of Catherine Greene, but in 1913 his remains were removed to Lexington, Virginia, the site of Washington and Lee University, and interred beside those of his son, Robert E. Lee. If local whites in Camden County remember anything about the history of Cumberland, it is that Robert K. Lee came three times to visit the grave of his father, the last time in 1870, when he himself was a tired, sick old man.
Louisa Greene Shaw died childless in 1831, leaving Dungeness to Phineas Miller Nightingale, the young boy who had met Light-Horse Harry Lee on the wharf. The Nightingale family operated Dungeness plantation until the start of the Civil War, retiring to the mainland like the other island families during hostilities. Northern officers used the grand old mansion as a headquarters after 1862, and when they left, they stripped the house of even its marble mantels and its books. I n 1866 Dungeness went up in flames and was never rebuilt. Only one of the Nightingales’ tabby buildings, a few scattered olive trees, and the little cemetery remain to remind us of the era of Kitty Greene.
