The Story of the Sea Cow

Long before bridges connected Georgia’s barrier islands to the mainland, cattle were already part of life along the Georgia coast.

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Cattle were introduced to the southeastern coast during the Spanish colonial period and were firmly established on Georgia’s coastal islands during the colonial era. On islands such as Cumberland and Ossabaw, cattle were allowed to range across large areas of maritime forest, grassland, and coastal hammocks. Over generations, some of these herds became free-ranging or completely feral.

 

Historical records establish that cattle lived on Georgia’s barrier islands during the colonial period and that later generations of cattle continued to roam these same islands. While the historical record does not establish through genetic evidence that every later feral herd was descended directly and exclusively from the earliest colonial cattle, the island cattle tradition itself stretches back centuries.

 

On Ossabaw Island, cattle were being managed by at least 1763, when records show the island producing beef, pork, and poultry. More than 160 years later, when Dr. Henry Norton Torrey purchased Ossabaw in 1924, he estimated that approximately 2,000 wild cattle and 10,000 wild hogs inhabited the island. A Georgia Department of Natural Resources history described these animals as descendants of domestic livestock that had been “wild for generations.”

 

Cumberland Island tells a similar story. According to the National Park Service, cattle grazed Cumberland for nearly 200 years. By the twentieth century, free-ranging cattle still inhabited the island’s maritime forests and fields. A 1966 Georgia government report described cattle, horses, and pigs there as remnants of earlier plantation days that “run wild.” Hundreds of free-ranging cattle remained on Cumberland into the 1970s before the remaining animals were eventually removed.

 

For generations, these cattle lived in an environment unlike almost anywhere else in America—surrounded by tidal rivers, salt marshes, maritime forests, and the Atlantic Ocean. The islands themselves served as enormous natural pastures, isolating herds and allowing cattle to survive and reproduce with relatively little human intervention.

 

They were, quite literally, cows of the Georgia coast.

 

That history inspired the name Sea Cow.

 

Sea Cow Butcher Shop & Gourmet Market celebrates this little-known chapter of Georgia’s coastal heritage—the cattle that once roamed our barrier islands and the generations of farmers, cattlemen, fishermen, and families who made their lives along this coast.

 

From the cattle pastures to the salt marshes, from the barrier islands to the mainland, Sea Cow is rooted in Coastal Georgia.