Jekyll Island, GA

For some reason I an't make all the text in this post the same font and size. I think it's because I lifted part from another source to describe a little of the history of the Jekyll Island Club. In any case, sorry for the uneven presentation of text 😒

The day before Thanksgiving we drove to Jekyll Island in a rental car to visit a place we'd completely missed last trip down the ICW due to cold weather that kept us on the move.  Our first stop was Driftwood Beach, where trees have been upended and left to weather over the years. Here we are in front of a mass of roots and trunks, and in a few other photos, you'll see lots of driftwood, a couple of girls suspended in their hammocks in the driftwood,  and a few cute little scavenging birds...

Jekyll Island is perhaps most famous for the Jekyll Island Club, founded in 1886, whose members purchased the Island for $125,000 to form a hunting and recreational club. The original Clubhouse is pictured below. The club thrived through the early 20th century; its members came from many of the world's wealthiest families, most notably the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts. At one point at least 1/4 of all wealth in the world was held by members of the Jekyll Island Club.

Around 1910, a self-selected handful of wealthy businessmen secretly met here to draw up a new framework for the US banking system. The group's original plan wasn't ratified by Congress, but one very much like it was adopted and became the basis of the Federal Reserve system that remains in place today. 

The Jekyll Island collaborators knew that public reports of their meeting would scupper their plans. The idea of senior officials from the Treasury, Congress, major banks and brokerages (along with one foreign national) slipping off to design a new world order has struck generations of Americans as distasteful at best and undemocratic at worst -- and would have been similarly received at the time. So the meeting of the minds was planned under the ruse of a gentlemen’s duck-hunting expedition. 

The club closed at the end of the 1942 season due to complications from WWII and the land and buildings were purchased by the state of Georgia. Thirty-three buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries surround the hotel; many are the elaborate mansion-sized "cottages" built by the rich. Some cottages offer rooms for rent for temporary stays. Others have been adapted for use as museums, art galleries, or bookstores. Several are shown below. 

A place of worship called Faith Chapel was built for all Club Members.  

It has two remarkable stained glass windows, one created by Tiffany and the other by Armstrong.  In the window by Armstrong on the left, the first figure visiting Mary and the baby Jesus is one of the Magi. The second appears to be a Roman in armor (maybe Pontius Pilate?) and the third, kneeling in a purple robe, appears to be Death, holding a crown of thorns.

There are also exterior gargoyles and several "grotesques" inside the Chapel

The last place we visited on Jekyll Island was the nearby Georgia Sea Turtle Center, where hundreds of Green, Leatherback and other types of sea turtles have been rescued and treated. We learned a lot about sea turtles, but I didn't get a good photo of any of them. The little blue-marked turtles below are Terrapins, not sea turtles.  

On Thanksgiving Day we went back to St Simons Island for the afternoon to walk on the beach. It was a gorgeous sunny breezy warm day.  The beach was splendid!! You think that the women in the photo below were more interested in seagulls and waves than in chatting with each other??