As the world remembers the late former President Jimmy Carter, lovers of Georgia’s Ossabaw Island are celebrating his role in saving it from development.
In 1978, then-President Carter facilitated the sale of the undeveloped island, one of the largest on Georgia’s coast, to the state as a Heritage Preserve.
The late Ossabaw Island matriarch Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West was part of the family that sold the island to the state for a fraction of its cost.
She told GPB in an interview back in 2000 that, without the sale, the island was in danger of becoming an overdeveloped coastal resort, not far from Savannah.
“Then Jimmy Carter came along,” West recalled. “And he sat on the floor at my feet when I was sitting in the picture window there and said, ‘Now, what do you think Ossabaw should be?’”
West said that she took Carter on a walk around the island, telling him that it was a “miracle” that “simply cannot be ruined.”
“And he thoroughly agreed!” exclaimed West, a beloved Savannah-area figure who died in 2021 at age 108.
Helping to protect the island and following in West's footsteps, Elizabeth DuBose runs the nonprofit Ossabaw Island Foundation.
She recalls that Carter campaigned not long ago, in 2020, when state lawmakers proposed a bill that would have opened up state Heritage Preserves to private development.
“With every group that visits Ossabaw, we make sure to share President Carter’s contribution to preserving the island,” DeBose said. “Mrs. West trusted him, at a time when it seemed there were few trustworthy players in the process.”
Ossabaw Island is managed by the Department of Natural Resources as Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve, a designation that has stricter uses than State Parks.
Visitors can only get there by boat — and only for scientific, educational and cultural purposes.
Carter was widely regarded for his environmental advocacy, especially in his home state, where the Flint, Chattooga and Chattahoochee rivers also owe their protected statuses in part to him.
