The Lunch Box Journals

Southern Georgia merges into the Atlantic Ocean in a maze of marsh, water and forest before touching the shimmering waves of water along the sandy beaches of the barrier islands. Protected by the marsh, most of the islands are inaccessible by motor transportation with just a few connected to the mainland by causeway and bridge.

In 1738 Mark Carr, a captain in James Oglethorpe’s company, established a tobacco plantation on “Plug Point”, a small peninsula lying between the East and Brunswick rivers offering a good site for a port somewhat protected from the ravages of hurricanes by several barrier islands. The English provincial government purchased the plantation in 1771 and laid out the town of Brunswick in a grid, much like that of Savannah to the north. The town slumbered on until 1856 when it was officially incorporated. The town hopes were short lived and Brunswick was abandoned during the Civil War and did not revive until the railroads linked the port to logging in the interior of the South as well as farming operations on neighboring islands. Unfortunately diseases associated the surrounding marsh periodically swept the community (yellow fever, malaria) and then in 1893 the town was flooded by a hurricane. Today I-95 bypasses Brunswick to the west and Hwy 17 is the historic route into the town. Before exploring Brunswick a detour to famed Jekyll Island is in order. Heading towards the turn-off to Jekyll Island I pass the Port of Georgia, a major shipping port for automobiles. The port is a primary export facility for Ford and General Motors and an import facility for Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia, Land Rover, Volvo, and others. Acres and acres of cars and trucks hide between a screen of trees, I am only able to catch a quick picture through a gap in the trees. In the background is the graceful arc of the bridge over the East River to the actual town of Brunswick.

On my right the marsh is laced with water as it stretches towards the ocean.

Jekyll Island is now owned by the state but it wasn’t always so…

Jekyll Island

The first permanent settlers on the island were British colonists in 1733 when James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia and explored the coastal islands. Jekyll Island was named in honor of one of his financial backers. A plantation was built on the island and was relatively prosperous over the years. The island was purchased by Christophe Poulain DuBignon in 1792 and remained in his family until 1886 when the island was sold to the Jekyll Island Club as a hunting club and vacation resort patronized by some of the wealthiest families of the United States. Club members included J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, Marshall Field, and William Rockefeller. In 1904 Munsey’s Magazine, a leading publication of the day, called the Jekyll Island Club “the richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world.” The island remained in the club’s ownership until 1947 when it was sold to the State of Georgia for use as a state park. The island is managed by the Jekyll Island Authority under several conditions, one of which is that only 35% of the land can be developed. The island could only be accessed by boat until 1954 when the causeway and bridge from the mainland was completed. An elegant entrance marks the entrance to the causeway.

The road snakes through the marsh before crossing a bridge onto the actual island.

The consortium of millionaires who owned Jekyll Island were looking for a “rustic” retreat, not a replica of the stunning summer mansions and elegant social scene of Newport, Rhode Island, in the north. Of course, their personification of “rustic” was not a tent in the swamp. The Dubignon cottage, just recently completed by the Dubignon family before the sale, was used in the early days as the club headquarters.

Interesting from today’s point of view, the club and associated cottages were all built on the west side of the island facing the marsh not along the sandy beaches along the eastern side. The island is only 7 miles long and 1.5 miles wide and the ocean side did not provide a good site for the docks and moorage needed for the yachts that brought the millionaires and their families to the island. The Jekyll Island Club also owned the steam ships that brought staff, supplies and visitors to the island, they all arrived at the wharf.

Once off the dock a short walk or carriage ride would take the visitor up to the club house.

The clubhouse, completed in 1888, was the center of activity on the island. A French chef ran the dining room, billiards, bowling and other activities were on the premises as well as rooms and suites for visitors to the island who did not actually have their own cottage. Today the club complex is a hotel, catering to a discerning clientele. On the afternoon that I visited the island a gracious game of croquet was taking place on the club lawns, players all dressed appropriately in white.

The clubhouse was very popular and soon became crowded so in 1896 the San Souci was built next door to handle the overflow.

On either side of the clubhouse along the marsh club members built their “rustic cottages” side by side Some of these homes have been converted to additional hotel rooms, others are sometimes available for touring.

Perhaps views were more open a hundred years ago, today each of the cottages faces the marsh and mainland to the west through a veil of trees and Spanish moss.

The Jekyll Island Club area is actually a small percentage of the island. As I leave the complex I am back into the dense vegetation that blankets rest of the island.

Hidden in the trees are a number of private homes, most appear to have been built in the years after the state assumed ownership of the island. Turns out that while the homes are in private ownership, the land underneath them is not. It still belongs to the state and is leased. A short drive across the island brings me to the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern beaches.

This is one of the few spots where the beach is visible, otherwise private homes (again, many decades old) line the beach. In this spot as you look north you can see that most of Jekyll Island’s beaches are lined with houses. The island is “built out”, the 35% allowed to be developed has been used up so if any new house is to be built an old one must be demolished.

A burst of construction has occurred in just the last ten years in an effort to revitalize the island. A new convention center, hotels and shopping center were completed on the Atlantic side of the island.

Definitely an interesting juxstipostition between the new Beach Village and the old Jeykll Island Club barely a mile apart on opposite sides of the island! Leaving Jekyll Island the views west again sweep across the marsh and waterways towards the mainland.

Back on Hwy 17 I can’t see the acres of new cars to my left but I can see the cargo ships that brought them as well as the bridge that I need to cross to reach Brunswick.

Brunswick

Brunswick itself is not a major tourist destination but it’s necessary to pass through Brunswick to access the Golden Isles (Jekyll, St. Simon, Sea and Little St. Simons islands.) Brunswick is at the end of a narrow peninsula hemmed in by water and marsh on three sides while the interstate highway cuts off the peninsula a number of miles to the west. Brunswick was originally founded in 1733 as a tobacco plantation and throughout its history has been an important port city in southeast Georgia.

In 1771 the town was formally platted in a rectangular manner similar to Savannah. The town struggled in the early years and wasn’t formally incorporated until 1856. It was then abandoned during the Civil war but prosperity returned in the post-war years as the railroad connected the port to the booming lumber industry in the interior of the southeast. Tourism began to be a factor in the local economy with the arrival of the Jekyll Island Club in 1886 but the end of the century saw a yellow fever epidemic and hurricanes. A significant boost to the local economy and the port came during WW II when a facility for building Liberty ships was created at the port and proved crucial to supplying ships for the war effort. Today the Port of Brunswick is the key to the local economy and is the sixth-busiest automobile port in the United States. Around 100,000 people live in the area, most outside of the city itself spreading across the lands towards the interstate to the west. The historical city center focuses on Newcastle Street, running parallel to the river on the south side of the peninsula. Efforts are being made to revitalize the downtown area but it appears that at this point in time most tourists bypass the city center on their way to the islands to the east.

Just as in Savannah (though on a much smaller scale) public “squares” punctuate a walk down Newcastle Street.

The eastern edge of the downtown strip is marked by the 1893 Old City Hall.

The 1899 Grand Opera House, now a live theater, marks the western border of the historic city center with the 1907 Glynn County Courthouse just beyond.

Jekyll Island lies southeast of Brunswick, the other three Golden Isles lie to the northeast. Little St. Simon Island is only accessible by boat and Sea Island is a private island, open only to people staying at the exclusive Sea Island Resort. Our destination is the most developed of the islands, St. Simons.

St. Simons Island

Long before the arrival of Spanish priests in 1568 and their attempt to establish missions along the Georgia coast the islands off Brunswick were home to Native Americans who lived off the plentiful resources of the land and sea. St. Simons, nearly 12 miles long and three miles wide, was home to a village of around 200 people by 1500. The Spanish missions never really thrived and the Spanish essentially withdrew from the area around 1702. However the island continued to be a source of conflict between the two empires so in 1736 the British governor of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, founded a colony and built Fort Frederica (named for the English king’s only son.) on a bluff on the northwest side of the island. The fort held a commanding position overlooking the river and marsh between St. Simons and the mainland effectively stopping he Spanish from heading north towards Savannah. By 1740 the population of Frederica hovered around 1,000 people. The Spanish threat ended in 1742 with Britain’s decisive victory over Spanish forces in the Battle of Bloody Marsh and the importance of the fort ebbed, leading to its’ abandonment in 1749. Once the fort closed, most of the citizens of the surrounding town left the island as well. The town faded away. After the Revolutionary War most people did not return to the island and it was divided into 14 cotton plantations, utilizing a substantial slave population to grow what became a highly desirable cotton known as Sea Island Cotton. Frederica was not revived as a town and the village of St. Simons at the southern end of the island became the primary town on St. Simons. Today only ruins mark what once was a prosperous community in the shadow of the remains of the old fort. A narrow road under magnificent old oaks follows the old military road north of St. Simon to Fort Frederica.

The Fort Frederica National Monument visitor center has one wall built out of the same material that the settlers used back in 1740, oyster shells. Mounds of shells left in large piles by the Native Americans over hundreds of years dotted the island and these shells, layered with wood logs, were set afire and burned to harvest the ash. The cooled ash was mixed with water, sand and unburnt shells to form “tabby”, a concrete-like mixture used all along the southeast coast as a building material. The gray wall of the visitor center is built of tabby.

There are very few remnants of Frederica today so the view across the boardwalk towards the where the town gates would have been is of a pastoral grove of oaks.

A diagram of the layout of Frederica helps orient oneself to the scene. The “You Are Here” box at the bottom of the diagram below is at the far end of the board walk in the picture above. I am going to follow the path outlined with arrows.

Standing at the town gate I can still see traces of the old town wall and moat on either side. Oak trees are now growing out of the top of the wall while a shadowed dip outlines the moat.

Before me stretches Broad Street, heading due west to the remains of the fort and lined with oak trees. Archeologial excavations have exposed the foundations of many of the buildings that once lined the main street of the town.

At the end of Broad Street are the ruins of the fort. “The Kings Magazine” is still standing, partically restored over the years. The vaults within were designed to protect the fort’s gunpowder. The fort’s walls extended both left and right from the magazine building.

Standing by where cannon would have lined the fort’s walls, one can easily see how the position commanded traffic up and down the river between Frederica and the mainland beyond.

The outline of the fort in the diagram notes that there were “arrowhead-like” points at each of the four corners. In this view of the fort you can barely see the outlines of the foundation of the fort walls, now covered with grass.

The British soldiers did not live inside of the fort walls. Officers and married men could live in houses in the village but a barracks was built on the north side of town to house single men. A partial reconstruction shows how the entrance to the barracks looked, based upon a drawing that was published in a magazine in London in 1747,

While Broad Street was the main east/west avenue in Frederica, Cross Street was the main north/south thoroughfare.

West of the town was the community graveyard.

Leaving the national monument we cross the historic Military Road, once the primary link between Fort Frederica on the north and Fort St. Simons on the southern tip of the island.

Just down the road from Frederica is another manifestation of the impact of that first British expedition of 1736. In addition to the settlers and military contingent the party included to young ministers, John and Charles Wesley, who later became known as the fathers of Methodism in the Christian faith. Charles Wesley conducted the first church services in Frederica and founded the local Church of England parish. The church endured even though the town did not. The first church was built on this property just outside of the Fort Frederica National Monument in 1820 and was damaged during the Civil War. The current church, Christ Episcopal Church, was built on the same site in 1884.

Leaving the north end of St. Simons I now head through the forest to the village of St. Simons at the southern tip of the island.

St. Simons is dominated by the St. Simons Lighthouse, completed in 1872 after the original 1810 lighthouse was destroyed during the Civil War.

The view from the lawn in front of the lighthouse stretches out across the entrance to the Brunswick harbor to Jekyll Island in the distance.

Just west of the lighthouse is the small village center and as I walk along the seawall towards the village center I see an unusual sight out in the ship channel. The ocean is to the left, Brunswick is to the right. On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2019, the cargo ship Golden Ray was leaving the port of Brunswick carrying about 4,300 vehicles and 24 crew members when it capsized just as the ship was turning right from the harbor channel towards the Atlantic Ocean. The cargo was not loaded correctly and when the ship turned enough of the cars shifted so that the movement of the weight caused the ship to roll over. Fortunately there were no lives lost in the mishap but the cargo ship and its’ cargo were a total loss. Now, a year and a half later, the ship is being sawed into eight pieces by a giant chain saw. What we are looking at in the left side of the picture is the bottom of the rolled over cargo ship inside of the yellow superstructure that was built to house the apparatus being used to cut the ship up into pieces. On the right is the fishing pier that reaches out from the main street of the village.