JEKYLL ISLAND, Ga. — Long before the legendary Jekyll Island Club Resort became a hotel, the island was already notable for several reasons, the foremost probably being its prime location on the Golden Isles, part of the cluster of barrier islands strung like a pearl necklace along Georgia’s coast. It is a beautiful, romantic place, a combination of ocean, maritime forests drizzled with Spanish moss and wide stretches of beach.
The Queen Anne-style hotel, with its grand turret, swaying palms and verdant gardens, is a living testament to the subtle grandeur of coastal Georgia as it was during the resort era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. At its heart, the Jekyll Island Club was originally founded in 1886 as an exclusive hunting retreat for members of America’s highest society — the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Pulitzers, Goodyears and Rockefellers — the Gilded Age tycoons who once journeyed to this pristine island of sand, surf and natural beauty to relax, hunt its abundant wildlife and escape the harsh winters of the North. Munsey’s Magazine called the club, “The richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world.”
From the mainland, the drive across the causeway to Jekyll Island is scenic and aromatic with silky, endless sweeps of cordgrass marsh, also called spartina, all ruffled by salty breezes of the Atlantic and sprinkled with flocks of wood storks, ibises and herons. The allure of the island is completed with dazzling sunrises and sunsets, and the air is always cloaked in shards of silvered and golden sunlight, which lends the entire area its sobriquet of the Golden Isles.
