Itinerant Guest: Jekyll to Cumberland's Hyde - Feb 16

Cumberland Island is a wild and wooly place, intentionally. Jekyll Island, next up the Georgia coast, is much more refined, but not without its wild places. I spent two days touring Jekyll Island and enjoyed an amazing variety of sights.

I had wanted to camp on Jekyll Island, but its only campground was completely booked by the time I got around to checking, so I stayed at a campground near the Interstate, about ten miles away. There’s exactly one bridge on and off the island, and an admission charge to the island is collected that they call a parking fee; you can park free anywhere on the island. About $6 a day, if I recall; a fair price.

The island is very narrow, particularly where the bridge comes ashore, and I made straight for the eastern side and the Atlantic seashore. Nice, large, nearly empty parking lot. You traverse an overgrown path:

see some fantastic dunes:

and come to one of the most pristine beaches I’ve ever seen:

Keep in mind, though, this was February. There are some shore birds to keep you company:

and occasional patches of wormy things washed up, fascinating and repellant at the same time:

From there, I moved on to a pier at the northern tip of the island:

There are wonderful views from the pier. To the west, you can see a beautiful suspension bridge on the mainland that has its north end in Brunswick, GA:

The photo doesn’t do justice to the beauty of the suspension cables. If you look carefully at the left tower, you can just make them out. To the north, across the water is Brunswick:

and to the east is some of Jekyll Island and oyster beds:

The driftwood you see in the center photo above is just a foretaste of what’s to come. There’s a place called Driftwood Beach that I missed on the way north, so I backtracked east and south a short way. The name did not prepare me for what I discovered:

Remains of a horseshoe crab, and some shells:

I love driftwood and gnarled trees. Can you tell?

Continuing on my counterclockwise tour around the northern half of the island, I came to this structure:

Nearby is the cemetery of the du Bignon family, also prominent in the island’s history:

Now on the western side of the island, I came to the environs of the Jekyll Island Club. The Carnegies owned Cumberland Island; it seems every other prominent family had a winter home in this Jekyll Island enclave: George Baker (a founder of the First National Bank of New York City), Cornelius Bliss (Secretary of the Interior under McKinley), Fredrick Bourne (president of the Singer Manufacturing Company), Charles Deering (President of International Harvester), Marshall Field, James Hill (CEO of the Great Northern Railway), Alanson Houghton (President of Corning Glass Works), Frank Goodyear, Morris Jessup (founder of the YMCA), Cyrus McCormick (president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company), J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William Rockefeller, Theodore Vail (president of AT&T), Cornelius Vanderbuilt, and a constellation of other luminaries, famous and infamous. Such a concentration of wealth and power is staggering. One noteworthy occasion is that Vail and others were on the island when they participated in the first transcontinental phone call:

Here’s a model of the village in which they all built “cottages”:

I took a tram tour of the village; here are some of the “cottages”.

du Bignon House:

Sans Souci, a dormitory for millionaires:

Hollybourne Cottage:

Crane Cottage:

Moss Cottage:

Indian Mound, owned by the Rockefellers:

We toured the interior of the last two, but interior photography is forbidden. Here are some shots of the clubhouse itself:

and a nearby indoor tennis complex:

The building I liked most was Faith Chapel (nondenominational):

The large arched window in the front is a genuine Tiffany, and the most beautiful stained glass I’ve ever seen. However, once again: no interior photography. But, I bought a postcard in the gift shop and scanned it. Probably illegal, but consider me a conscientious objector:

What the postcard/scan fails to capture is the ethereal luminous beauty of the original. The rectangular window on the back of the church (actually, the sanctuary end) is by Maitland Armstrong, one of Tiffany’s students: