Golden Isles Grand Tour: Jekyll, Cumberland & St. Simons

The Jekyll Island Club, founded in 1888, was for fifty years the most exclusive private retreat in America. Its membership roster — limited by design to 100 families — included William Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Marshall Field, and dozens of other titans of American industry and finance. They collectively controlled, at the club's peak, an estimated one-sixth of all wealth in the United States. The island was so private that arriving guests were met at the dock by the club's own servants; the members' children attended a private school on the grounds; and the Jekyll Island Club telegraph line was used for a secret 1910 banking meeting that produced the blueprint for the Federal Reserve Act. Today 33 of the original Club-era structures survive in the Historic District National Historic Landmark, most fully restored. The guided tram tour, departing from the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, is the best way to cover the ground: it enters the 1886 Queen Anne main clubhouse, the Crane Cottage (the largest surviving cottage, a 17,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival villa built for Chicago plumbing magnate Richard Teller Crane Jr. in 1917), Faith Chapel with its Tiffany windows, and several of the smaller family cottages.

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center in the restored 1903 power plant on the Historic District grounds rehabilitates injured loggerhead, green, and Kemp's ridley sea turtles from Georgia coastal waters. The rehabilitation pools are observable by visitors, and the interpretive exhibits are substantive and well-designed. Jekyll Island is one of the most important loggerhead nesting beaches in Georgia, with nests marked and monitored by volunteers each season.

Cumberland Island is the largest of Georgia's Golden Isles and the most extraordinary: 36,000 acres of maritime forest, salt marsh, freshwater wetlands, and 18 miles of undeveloped Atlantic beach, accessible only by ferry, with no cars and no paved roads beyond the basic service track. Thomas Carnegie, younger brother of Andrew Carnegie, purchased most of the island in the 1880s and built a 150-room winter estate called Dungeness, which burned in 1959 and now stands as one of the most dramatic ruins in the American South: tabby and brick walls still standing in the maritime forest, overgrown by resurrection ferns and smilax, haunted by wild horses that take shelter in the shade of the roofless rooms.

A walk north from Dungeness through the live oak tunnel leads to the First African Baptist Church, built in 1937 by the Gullah community of Halfmoon Bluff — one of the last settled communities on the island. The small white clapboard church became internationally known when John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were married here secretly on September 21, 1996. But the church's own history predates that famous event by generations: it served the descendants of enslaved people who had lived and worked on Cumberland Island through the Carnegie era and beyond, and the surrounding cemetery holds many of their graves, including that of the legendary island figure Robert Stafford who was born enslaved and died free.

From the First African Baptist Church, a trail leads east through the dune scrub to the Atlantic beach: 18 miles of undeveloped coastline with nothing between you and Portugal but open ocean and the occasional container ship on the horizon. The beach is wide, the surf is consistent, and the sheer emptiness of it — no buildings, no people for miles in either direction, just the crash of Atlantic waves and the cry of terns — is the defining experience of Cumberland Island. Loggerhead sea turtle nests are staked along the beach in summer. Wild horses wander down from the dunes to drink at freshwater seeps in the swale behind the beach.

After the afternoon ferry back to St. Marys, drive north on I-95 to Brunswick and across the causeway to St. Simons Island — about 45 minutes total — for the second overnight.

Fort Frederica National Monument preserves the ruins of one of the most significant British colonial sites in North America. General James Oglethorpe established the town and fort of Frederica on the western shore of St. Simons Island in 1736, just three years after founding the Georgia colony at Savannah, as a military bulwark against Spanish expansion from Florida. At its peak in the 1740s, Frederica was a full town of 500 soldiers and civilians — barracks, workshops, a church, homes, and a garden — protected by a substantial earthwork fort on the Frederica River. On July 7, 1742, Fort Frederica became the site of the Battle of Bloody Marsh, a pivotal military engagement in which Oglethorpe's forces ambushed a Spanish column attempting to cross a marsh causeway. The Spanish, already demoralized by Oglethorpe's psychological warfare, retreated to their fleet and never again seriously threatened the Georgia colony. It was the last significant Spanish military offensive in what is now the United States. The tabby ruins of the town walls and some structures are visible from the interpretive trail; the NPS museum provides excellent context for the military and colonial significance of the site.

Christ Church, Frederica, stands in a grove of ancient live oaks half a mile from Fort Frederica, its churchyard dense with moss-hung trees and 18th- and 19th-century grave markers. The original church was established in 1736 — the year John Wesley arrived in Georgia as a missionary — and Wesley conducted services here before returning to England where he would found the Methodist movement. The current Gothic Revival building dates to 1820 with later renovations, but the churchyard contains graves from the colonial period, and the atmosphere under the vast live oak canopy is one of the most evocative in the Golden Isles.

The St. Simons Lighthouse, completed in 1872, is one of only five surviving 19th-century lighthouses on the Georgia coast and one of the most handsome: a 104-foot white brick tower with a distinctive Victorian keeper's cottage at its base, surrounded by live oaks at the edge of the Pier Village. The adjacent Coastal Georgia Historical Society museum traces the full history of St. Simons Island from prehistoric occupation through the plantation era, the Civil War, and 20th-century resort development. The climb to the lighthouse lantern room offers a panoramic view of the Golden Isles, Jekyll Island to the south, and the vast salt marsh ecosystem of the mainland coast.