American summer

By Ty Sawyer

updated 7:37 p.m. ET Aug. 31, 2006

Saltwater taffy, beachside bonfires, grand old hotels and boardwalks — ah, the American summer. Jekyll Island, Georgia, is one U.S. island where you can retreat to the happy days.

“Can you hear them?” I turned to see a lady who’d come up behind me on the bike path. Everyone on Jekyll Island travels by bike. I was gazing into a meadow thick with massive live oaks whose branches arched to the ground, every inch dripping with curtains of Spanish moss. I’d just pulled over because I’d seen two white-tailed deer, but they’d disappeared into the thickets of saw palmetto that coat Jekyll.

“Hear who?”

“We call that Spanish moss ‘old man’s beard’ here,” she answered cryptically. “Each of those bundles holds a memory from the island’s past. It gets trapped in the filaments, like those Indian dreamcatchers. You can hear the voices whisper when the wind blows through them.”

“Whose memories?”

“Indians, colonists, yours, mine, the millionaires who lived here, everyone who has ever set foot on the island … these trees are like libraries in charge of keeping the island’s archives.” We both looked up at the branches. If there were memories woven into the pale, delicate filaments of these trembling epiphytes, then each tree held volumes.

“It’s the island’s secret history. You might not believe me, but you’ve got to listen. Slow down and listen.” Then she smiled, mounted her bike and continued on down the path.

“And don’t leave the island without watching the sun rise on Driftwood Beach,” she called back. “It’s unforgettable.”

I watched her round the corner, hardly believing I’d just had that conversation. I’d been on Jekyll Island, just off the coast of Georgia, for less than 24 hours, and everywhere I went someone was telling me about something I shouldn’t miss, some cherished corner of this tiny island.

Ty Sawyer

You can feel the tug of yesterday from the moment you pass through the twin gate towers on the Downing Musgrove Causeway that leads from the mainland to Jekyll. The island exudes history and time slows to a murmur in the thick Georgia air. There are no stoplights on Jekyll. No fast-food restaurants, either; life centers around the beach and the manicured, oak-shaded grounds of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Twenty miles of bike paths meander around the 7.5-mile-long island, connecting the past to the present.

Travelers usually prefer to revel in the past on Jekyll; it’s a truly secret history, since the place was once one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. A place that did not welcome the curious eyes of the common man. Or even the uncommon man, since it has been said that during the 56 years the Club was in existence “no unwanted foot ever touched the island.”

Jekyll was once the private playground of the families that controlled one-sixth of the world’s wealth. The island came alive at a time when all things seemed possible; people now come for a touch of the magic of this enchanting era.

Jekyll Island and its salt marshes, palmetto-thick forests and empty beaches spilled into our nation’s collective imagination about 1888, when a group of millionaires whose names have not dimmed with time — Rockefeller, Morgan, Pulitzer, Goodyear, Vanderbilt — decided to build a club and a few “cottages” so they could escape the hard winters and relentless business pressure of the north, so they could socialize and so they could live lives, even if in small measures, of gentlemanly ease, without scrutiny.

They came to Jekyll for “the season,” January to March, from 1888 until 1942, when the threat of German U-boats off the coast during WWII brought the revels to an end. After that, most of the homes, the island and the club were abandoned; their patrons’ attentions turned elsewhere. In 1947, the island was purchased by the state of Georgia from the Jekyll Island Club, and in 1954 it was opened to the public via a new drawbridge. Since then, just a few homes have even been built on land leased by the state.

The Jekyll Island Club, two cottages and some of the first apartments from the original club were renovated, converted into a hotel and reopened in 1986. The season now stretches year-round, with the visitors’ population swelling in the sultry Georgia summer.

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