Jekyll Island & The Jekyll Island Club: Introduction & Index

Posted on by

Introduction, 7 November 2023 Word Count 950, 4-minutes Reading Time with 3 Images

We first discovered Jekyll Island in July 1993 when my wife Debbie and I stayed in a portion of J.P. Morgan’s San Souci apartment for our honeymoon. We toured the historic district while also enjoying the very things the millionaire club members had done, e.g., cycling, spending time at the pool, hitting a few golf balls and dining in the clubhouse. It was a grand and relaxing time, and none-to-crowded.

However, we did not make time to return again for 29-years when, in October 2022, we made a five-day trip to the Georgia Barrier Islands, including three days on Jekyll Island where we re-discovered and enjoyed cycling around the island each day and learning more about the history of the island before, during and after ‘The Club Era’ for which it is best known.

In order to build on what I’d learned on those visits and from reading several books, I decided to create my own ‘journal’ to capture the history in a way that would make it easier for me to remember, recall or revisit. I suspect like others who have taken the time to learn more about Jekyll Island and the history of the Jekyll Island Club, I found myself buried under a wealth of information, images and things I wanted to highlight in my journal such that I too ended-up breaking it up into volumes, so to speak.

Moreover, as I read-through what I’d captured, I found I needed to scale-back the detail with the knowledge that I also intended to give full credit to my sources so that anyone with an interest in learning more, could go to the more detailed, highly-researched and footnoted books, all of which I have read at least twice from cover-to-cover.

Note that, this is not an original work. Instead, it is my attempt and building a consolidated, chronological narrative of several excellent books and on-line resources that provide a very detailed account about Jekyll Island History.

The most valuable of these books for the early history are the ones by June Hall McCash with various different co-authors including her late husband William Barton McCash and Brenden Martin. For the more current, state era history, Nick Doms book has been invaluable and in regard to the very recent proposed and rebuffed development efforts by Linger Longer and Trammell Crow, as were the ‘images’ and ‘postcard’ books. The following is essentially by bibliography of the published books, followed by links to just a few of the on-line resources:

Other On-LineSources: The New Georgia Encyclopedia and others including Wikipedia, JSTOR, Today in Georgia History, Bill of Rights Institute, Coastal Georgia DNR, n-georgia.com, Heroes, Heroines & History, Society of Architectural Historians as well as those linked off of entries in the narrative, below. Malvern

For anyone looking to gain a full appreciation for the subject, I strongly encourage you to find and read these works and see the images they include. They are compelling to read and filled with far more details and facts than what I’d characterize as my high-level overview of the Club Era. It was originally my intention to provide a more comprehensive look than what I have thus far composed in my spare time that quickly turned into an Alice-in-Wonderland like journey down multiple Rabbit Holes.

And, if anyone finds factual errors with the data I’ve included in my compilations, or sees that I have shared factual data out of context where it alters or mis-represents the true history, included the wrong photos or dates when photos were taken, please let me know immediately so that I can correct my errors. Feel free do so with with a comment or by sending an Email to me at Mark@Werlivingood.com.

A Little More Background: Creating this type of a detailed, web-based historical resource more-or-less became a hobby of mine in March 2022 when I first decided to dive into and capture the history of our beloved, nearby Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. That inspired me to learn more about the history of the city of Marietta, the state of Georgia and our local county. After that, I produced a series of articles on the Bell Bomber Plant & Lockheed in Georgia, my former employer of some 34-years, 27-of-which were here in Georgia. Over the past year, I began to create an on-going series of articles related to exhibits at the Savoy Automobile Museum in Cartersville Georgia that has turned into something of an obsession. And, the latter was something I needed to take a step away from, which my research into Jekyll Island’s history has enabled me to do.

Leave a comment