The name Wormslow derives from Noble Jones’s attempts to produce silk from silkworms that fed on the leaves of mulberry trees. During the mid-nineteenth century, George Jones (Noble Jones’s great-grandson) pursued the role of a Southern gentleman farmer, acquired a cotton gin, and used much of the land, tended by slaves, to grow a small amount of cotton and some food provisions. Most of the remaining uncultivated land was used for grazing. The Jones family’s wealth, however, came primarily from property investments in Savannah, as well as dividends from a wide variety of industrial ventures. During the Civil War, Wormslow was the site of a Confederate earthwork known as Fort Wimberly (still partially visible). After the fall of Savannah, Union troops vandalized the Jones house, and when the war ended the family fled to Europe, where George Jones was inspired to add Wymberley as his middle name and substitute De Renne for Jones. The De Renne family returned from Europe in 1870, received a federal pardon, purchased the Joseph S. Fay House (8.2) in the city, and used Wormsloe (the family’s spelling of the name) as a summer retreat. The 65-acre Barrow Estate, with its 1826 house belonging to Jones’s descendants, is now home to the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History. The remaining 822 acres of Wormsloe were given to the State of Georgia in 1972.