Jekyll Island: Millionaires, Turtles & Gilded Age Ghosts

The Jekyll Island Club was founded in 1888 by a syndicate of 53 of the wealthiest men in America, each purchasing a membership share for $600 — roughly $20,000 today. For more than fifty years, from January through April each winter, the island's membership roster read like a directory of American capitalism: William Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, and the extended Carnegie family all maintained cottages here. It is said that when the members gathered, they represented one-sixth of the world's total wealth. The island was so exclusive that it had its own telegraph line, its own ferry, and its own physician on retainer. In 1910, the Jekyll Island Club was the unlikely site of a secret meeting between banking executives and a U.S. Senator that produced the plan eventually enacted as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 — perhaps the most consequential private meeting in American financial history. Today the Jekyll Island Historic District National Historic Landmark encompasses 33 surviving structures from the Club era, most of them immaculately restored and open for tours. The centerpiece is the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, the restored 1886 Queen Anne main clubhouse with its distinctive four-story tower, wide verandas, and formal dining room that now operates as a hotel. Surrounding it are the 'cottages' — private winter homes whose scale and ambition put that modest word to shame.

Built in 1892 for William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the Indian Mound Cottage is one of the grandest surviving structures in the historic district, a shingled Queen Anne mansion perched on a prehistoric shell midden mound left by Timucua and Guale people who inhabited the island for thousands of years before European contact. The mound, though subtle in relief, is clearly visible beneath the live oaks surrounding the cottage foundation, an extraordinary layering of human history on a single patch of ground. The cottage's broad ocean-facing veranda overlooks Jekyll Sound and the Georgia marshes.

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center is a working sea turtle hospital and research facility on the Jekyll Island Historic District grounds, operating inside a restored 1903 power plant building. The public exhibits walk visitors through the biology of all five sea turtle species found in Georgia coastal waters — loggerhead, leatherhead, Kemp's ridley, hawksbill, and green — and the specific injuries and ailments that bring them into rehabilitation: boat strikes, cold stunning, fishing line entanglement, and buoyancy disorders caused by swallowed plastic. The rehabilitation pools are observable through large windows, where you can watch recovering turtles — some the size of trash can lids — being cared for by veterinary staff. Jekyll Island's beaches are among the most important loggerhead sea turtle nesting sites on the East Coast, with 150-500 nests documented each season from May through August.

At the northern tip of Jekyll Island, the ocean beach transitions into one of the most visually striking landscapes on the Georgia coast: a wide tidal flat strewn with the bleached, gnarled trunks and root masses of enormous live oaks and pines, killed and toppled as the shoreline has migrated landward over the past century. The trees, stripped of bark and polished silver-grey by salt water and sun, create a surreal sculptural environment that photographers and painters have documented obsessively. The effect is otherworldly at golden hour, when long shadows fall across the pale driftwood and the sound of the Atlantic is the only noise. It is also an honest visual document of coastal erosion in action — the same forces that shaped the barrier island are slowly consuming it.