June Hall McCash - Jekyll Islands Early Years: From Prehistory through Reconstruction

Jekyll Islands Early Years

Paperback edition published in 2014 by
The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
2005 by June Hall McCash
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the
hardcover edition of this book as follows:
McCash, June Hall.
Jekyll Islands early years :
from prehistory through Reconstruction /
June Hall McCash.
XV, 280 p.: ill., maps; 25 cm.

(Wormsloe Foundation publications; no. 25)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 253261) and index.
ISBN 0-8203-2447-7 (alk. paper)
1. Jekyll Island (Ga.)History. I. Title.
II. Publications (Wormsloe Foundation); no. 25.
F292.G58M385 2005
975.8742dc22 2005001134

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Paperback ISBN 978-0-8203-4738-7

Excerpt from The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson. Copyright 1955
by Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1983 by Roger Christie. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4782-0

FOR RICHARD,
who led me back to the feast

Surely Prospero, waving anew his magic wand,
could never summon from the vasty deep an
island more historically picturesque.

FRANKLIN HARVEY HEAD

THE STATEMENT quoted above was one of the few truths that Franklin Head stated in his charming spoof, The Legends of Jekyl Island, written to entertain his friends at the Chicago Literary Club in December 1892. From this delightful and evidently successful hoax, written to amuse his clever friends, come many of the inaccuracies and much of the misinformation that circulated for decades about Jekyll Islands early history. Even though Head had never intended his version of Jekyll history as a serious interpretation and no doubt would have been surprised that anyone could mistake it for truth, he was nevertheless quite right about one important point. The island is historically picturesque.

In 1892 Franklin Harvey Head wrote a spoof of Jekyll Islands history for the Chicago Literary Club. When later writers took it seriously, it became the source of much misinformation about Jekyll Islands early years. (Men of Illinois, 1902)

A more serious attempt to capture the islands history was undertaken by the club member Charles Stewart Maurice and his wife, Charlotte. Together, sometime before her death in 1909, they wrote a small booklet in which Charlotte collected historical notes and legends, while her husband penned a brief outline of the early days of the elite Jekyll Island Club, which had been organized on the coast of Georgia in 1886.points to the interest of Jekyll Island Club members in the early history of the island. The division of labor for the Maurice booklet also suggests that the islands history is justifiably viewed and accurately told in two fundamentally different parts: the early history of the island and the club history.

Charlotte Holbrooke Maurice made the first serious attempt to retell Jekyll Islands early history. (From the collection of the Tioga Point Museum, Athens, Pa.)

Like most of those who come to Jekyll Island today and seek to learn about its past, I first became interested in the Jekyll Island Club era, with its amazing array of members with names like Gould, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Pulitzer. An exhibit of archival materials from the collection of the Jekyll Island Museum happened to be on display during one of my first visits to the island. The exhibit, which included the original membership list, the clubhouse register, and the map drawn by Horace W. S. Cleveland, identifying the owners of the various lots, had an amazing impact on both me and my coauthor, my late husband, Bart McCash. Thus, it was the club, not the islands earlier history, that became the subject of our book together, The Jekyll Island Club: Southern Haven for Americas Millionaires (University of Georgia Press, 1989). The second volume, The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony (University of Georgia Press, 1998), which we had just begun before his untimely death in 1991, is an expansion of that club history and tells the stories of the various families who owned cottages in the club compound at Jekyll.

The present volume represents a completely new departure, an effort to capture, with as much accuracy as modern research allows and with greater access to archival materials than Charlotte Maurice had, the period of Jekyll history that has never been told in any detail, the preclub era. I depict the time when Native Americans occupied or seasonally used the island until the period that shook our nation and changed the South foreverthe Civil War and its aftermath during Reconstruction.

Readers who wish to continue the story beyond this era are encouraged to see the earlier two volumes mentioned above, on the history of the Jekyll Island Club, for which this current work is, essentially, a prequel. Those two books continue the story of Jekyll Island that was begun so many thousands of years ago in an age that has no recorded history. For information on the state era of the island, which began in 1947, five years after the closing of the club during World War II, readers are encouraged to examine an article that I recently coauthored with my son and university colleague C. Brenden Martin, From Millionaires to the Masses: Tourism at Jekyll Island, Georgia, in a volume titled Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (University of Alabama Press, 2003), edited by Richard Starnes. Perhaps one day we can jointly write the fascinating history of the state era in greater detail and thereby complete the story of this Georgia Golden Isle.

IN PREPARING this present volume, I have, as always, had the full support and help of the staff at the Jekyll Island Museum. I would especially like to thank Warren Murphey, whose ongoing enthusiasm for my projects and tirelessness in answering my endless questions are invaluable. John Hunter as well has contributed in countless ways, particularly in helping me to locate and obtain photographs of items from the collection of Native American artifacts found on Jekyll Island and contained in the museum. Both have assisted my work in the Jekyll archives and collections with willingness and enduring patience. At the Museum of Coastal History on St. Simons, I appreciate the assistance of Pat Morrison, Deborah Thomas, and Marilyn Marsh. And at the Georgia Historical Society, where I became a virtual fixture for several weeks, I would like to express my appreciation to all the staff members who cheerfully helped me to locate materials and answered my stream of questions, especially Susan Dick and Jewell Anderson Dalrymple. The staff at the Georgia Department of Archives and History, particularly Dale Couch and Sandy Boling, has also provided invaluable resources and assistance, as has the staff in special collections at Emory University, the University of Georgia, and especially Alan Boehm at the Walker Library of Middle Tennessee State University. I would like to add a particular word of thanks to Carey Knapp and Diane Jackson at the Three Rivers Regional Library in Brunswick, Georgia; to Lola Jamsky, clerk of the Superior Court of Glynn County; and to Mary Evelyn Tomlin, archivist at the National Archives Southeastern Region at East Point, Georgia. Many other curators and staff members have been helpful in sharing their materials, including those at Duke University; the University of North Carolinas Southern Historical Collection; the Winterthur Museum; the National Archives of St. Kitts, Basseterre, West Indies; and the British Public Records Office. Amy Hedrick and Chris Chapman have also provided assistance and enthusiasm for helping ferret out obscure materials in Brunswick.