Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Program from Santo Domingo Park Dedication 1935
On November 22, 1935, officials and guests gathered at a site north of Brunswick to dedicate Santo Domingo State Park. Attendees listened to speeches by local proponents of the park, officials from the Department of the Interior, and an Army general. At the ceremony, Cator Woolford, the donor of the site, presented the deed to Eugene Talmadge, the governor of Georgia. The festivities seemed to predict a bright future for Georgia’s newest state park.
Santo Domingo State Park was so named for a Spanish mission which was once believed to have occupied the site. The Spanish first established a string of missions in Georgia in the sixteenth century, hoping to convert the native Timucua and Guale people to Catholicism. Santo Domingo was abandoned by 1685 due to a rapidly declining Timucua and Guale population and raids on the mission system by both Native Americans and pirates.
By the early 1800s, the land that would become Santo Domingo State Park was owned by Dr. Robert Grant, who operated it as a sugar and rice plantation named Elizafield. The grounds housed many tabby buildings, including rice and sugar mills. The Grant family evacuated Elizafield during the Civil War and never returned to live there. Over the following decades, the property fell into disrepair.
When the ruins of Elizafield’s tabby structures were rediscovered, several historians, including Brunswick native and author Mary Ross, theorized that they were part of the lost Santo Domingo mission. This exciting idea led to the creation of Santo Domingo State Park in 1935. Just two years later, historian E. Merton Coulter published a work which correctly identified the ruins as Elizafield’s sugar mill.
Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Rice mill chimney at Elizafield Plantation
Within a decade, Glynn County had lost its only state park. J. Ardell Nation purchased the land from the state of Georgia in 1945 and founded an orphanage for boys there. Today, the area surrounding the former Santo Domingo State Park is still known as Boys Estate.
This month’s images from the Coastal Georgia Historical Society include the program for the dedication of Santo Domingo State Park and a postcard of the rice mill chimney at Elizafield Plantation.
