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Jekyll Island Club

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The Jekyll Island Club

The Jekyll Island Club was a private club on Jekyll Island, the smallest barrier island on Georgia's ocean coast. Founded in 1886, the club’s members came from many of the world’s richest families, who used the club’s premises as a resort to escape from cold winters. After the club closed at the end of the 1942 season, the U.S. military used the club property for the duration of WW II. In 1947, the state of Georgia purchased the island from the club's remaining members. The state government of Georgia operated the club property as a resort for the public, but lost money and in 1971 closed the resort complex, which remained dormant for more than a decade. In 1978 the resort complex was designated a historic landmark. After restoration, Radisson Hotels reopened the resort in 1985 as the Radisson Jekyll Island Club. In 2021 Pebblebrook Hotel Trust acquired the property, now called the “Jekyll Island Club Resort”.

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  • The State of Georgia took formal possession of Jekyll Island on October 7, 1947. By early November, road-grading equipment was shipped to the island and approximately 15 highway department employees worked on improving the road infrastructure. While discussion of sending a work detail of 100 to 150 convicts was contemplated, it was eventually decided to use primarily contractors and paid laborers to revitalize island buildings. For a brief time in early 1948 about 30 prisoners and 6 Board of Correction guards from Reidsville, Georgia came to the island and trimmed palmettos, cut grass and pruned golf course vegetation. ...
    ... Jekyll Island State Park officially opened March 5, 1948.
  • Charles A. Alexander designed the clubhouse in a Queen Anne style most easily recognized by the prominent turret that seems to be watching over the clubhouse and its grounds. Today, anyone who books a night in the Jekyll Island Club Hotel's Presidential Suite can enjoy the turret.
    Well over 100 years after it opened in January 1888, the Jekyll Island Clubhouse, now the centerpiece of the Jekyll Island Club Resort, looks remarkably unchanged. Noticeably, there is one piece of the early clubhouse silhouette that no longer exists. The water tower and windmill that appear in many early photographs and postcard did not survive to the modern era.
  • ... After Horton’s death and temporary possession by several individuals, the island eventually passed into the hands of Christophe du Bignon, a wealthy landowner fleeing the excesses of the French Revolution. Establishing a plantation built on slave labor, ownership of the island stayed in the family until the last remaining du Bignon, John Eugene, after founding the Jekyll Island Club, sold the island to the club for $125,000 in the late 1880’s.
    The plantation period of Jekyll’s history evokes reminders of slave labor and the horrendous conditions that they endured. ...
    The island achieved widespread name recognition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the exclusive Jekyll Island Club became the destination for the fabulously wealthy titans of the country. Rockefeller, Pulitzer, and J.P. Morgan were but a few of the patrons of the club. Tangible reminders of the Jekyll Island Club years are the buildings themselves, where millionaires spent the winters on the island in the resort’s clubhouse or in their custom-built “cottages.”
  • Of the original members of the Jekyll Island Club, almost half belonged to the Union Club.
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