David Ball is readying for his annual late-summer trip to High Point, his family’s private retreat on Cumberland Island. He’s cleaning and rigging his fishing gear, collecting supplies and foodstuffs — there’s no grocery or convenience store on the primitive barrier island — and eagerly anticipating evenings on the porches of homes built by his mother and grandparents.
He’s also fuming over what he sees as a threat to his future on the property. Ball is a great-great-great-grandson of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler, whose eldest son, Howard, in 1929 bought a shuttered Gilded Age resort, the High Point Hotel, along with surrounding land at Cumberland’s remote northern tip and transformed it into a vacation compound for generations of his descendants.
A limited liability company led by two family members, Sam Candler and Glenn Warren, is negotiating a land exchange with the National Park Service meant to ensure the Candlers’ long-term presence at High Point. But Ball and his two brothers, Lamar and Warren, are not part of the LLC and David and Warren have voiced fears about what a change in ownership would mean for them and their descendants.
“If they get this thing, they’ll find a way to kick us off or drive us off,” said David Ball, a 71-year-old Statesboro resident and the owner and operator of a community service nonprofit, the Outreach Center. “I’ll take a bulldozer to my mother’s house before I let them get full control of it.”
What’s the deal with the land swaps?
The Balls’ angst stems from a series of proposed Cumberland land exchanges that have faced fierce public debate since being made public two years ago. The deals would swap federally owned lands in out-of-the-way parts of the Georgia barrier island for private tracts near land frequented by visitors, such as public docks, campgrounds and walking trails…