Where did JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette get married? Seeking privacy on their special day, the couple chose to marry on an island off the coast of Georgia that is only accessible by ferry.
In doing so for their wedding on September 21, 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette followed in the footsteps of the Carnegies and the Rockefellers in gravitating toward Cumberland Island, Georgia, a nearly 20-mile-long refuge of moss-draped oaks, wild horses, and, at the time, no telephone lines, no paved roads, and no accommodations other than a handful of rooms at the Greyfield Inn, where the couple held their rehearsal dinner and reception.
“It was wonderful to have no press around,” one of John and Carolyn’s roughly 40 attendees at their wedding told The New York Times back in 1996. “We were so excited to have fooled everybody.”
For such a public couple, privacy was their chief aim with their wedding, held just over a year after John and Carolyn got engaged over the Fourth of July 1995. Caterers and staff at the reception signed confidentiality agreements. Guests were not invited until September 17, The New York Times reported, just four days before the ceremony itself on the 21st.
“Cumberland Island feels both magical and wonderfully untamed,” Mary Ferguson, co-owner of the Greyfield Inn, tells Glamour. “It’s wild in a deeply restorative way—a place where the rhythms of the tides, the shifting marsh light, and the quiet presence of the live oaks set the pace of the day. For those who have never visited, it is not a place of crowds or constant activity. It’s a place to reconnect—with nature, with loved ones, and often with yourself. There is a rare kind of quiet here.”
Inside John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s secret Cumberland Island wedding
Cumberland Island was only home to about 35 people in 1996. One of the its residents, Carol Ruckdeschel, lived in a house next to the First African Baptist Church, where John and Carolyn exchanged vows. It wasn’t until the Kennedy family began arriving that she learned that there was to be a celebrity wedding afoot. “I took my bowl of popcorn and a beer and a milk crate and sat out there in the horse barn and watched,” she told The New York Times. “I just thought it was interesting. I said, ‘I’m going to kick myself later if I just go in and read my book.’”