Kingsland, Georgia: Railroad Town at the Florida Line

About ten miles from the Florida state line, Kingsland was established in eighteen ninety-four as a stop on the Plant System railroad, named for William Henry King, who owned the land. It was incorporated in nineteen oh eight and became a small but useful waypoint for the timber and turpentine trade flowing through coastal Georgia. For most of the twentieth century it remained a quiet crossroads town.

The arrival of Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in the nineteen seventies, just a few miles east, changed the equation. The base, which became the East Coast home port for the Navy's fleet of ballistic missile submarines in the nineteen eighties, brought thousands of military families and the civilian workers who support them. Kingsland's population grew from under five thousand in nineteen ninety to more than eighteen thousand in twenty twenty, making it one of the fastest-growing small cities in coastal Georgia.