Urbexers Helped Resurrect and Preserve the Jekyll Island Club

Most urban explorers, or urbexers, tend to be respectful, but they also push the boundaries and often trespass. And in our digital age, they often do it in pursuit of more clicks. However, in the mid-1980s, before “urbex” even became a popular term, two guys opened a window and tumbled into the remains of the former Jekyll Island Club. Thankfully.

I can’t say enough good things about Jekyll Island. It’s one of the most romantic haunted places we’ve jaunted to (so far), and the Jekyll Island Club Resort is one of my favorite haunted hotels. The island (and hotel) is also great place to find ghosts of Christmases past, which I not only wrote about but included in an episode of the Haunted Christmas season on the podcast.

In fact, during the pandemic, there came a point we couldn’t take being housebound anymore. But we also didn’t want to take too many chances with COVID-19 travel. Where could we go and pretty much naturally social distance? Jekyll Island. (But along the way, we also stayed a night in Helen, Georgia.)

We’d visited Jekyll many times before that visit in 2020. (When we lived in Jacksonville, Florida, it was one of my favorite day trip destinations.) But it was this trip where I learned something I’d never known about the Jekyll Island Club hotel before: how a couple of urbexers were responsible for preserving, renovating, and reopening the Club.

Jekyll Island Club’s Hunting Origins

If, like me, you hear the name “Jekyll Island,” it may conjure thoughts of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (It does for me. Every single time.)

But that story was published in 1886, a century and a half after the island was founded. The Jekyll Island Club Resort’s “History” page explains that Jekyll Island was born back in 1733 when General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia. He named the barrier island after Sir Joseph Jekyll, his friend and financier.

Fast forward to 1792 when Christophe DuBignon bought land on Jekyll Island. And fast forward again to when one of his descendants, John Eugene DuBignon, along with Newton Finney, decided to create a private hunting club on the island for the nation’s wealthiest people.

In 1886 the dream became a reality when these wealthy individuals formed the Jekyll Island Club and bought the Island.

Munsey’s Magazine called it, “the richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world.”

It opened in 1888 and quickly became the fashionable winter retreat for society’s upper crust. By 1896 an expansion was underway with the addition of Sans Souci, a six-unit building that J.P. Morgan partly owned. It’s also one of the first condominiums in the U.S.

The Annex was added to the Clubhouse in 1901, giving members, their families, and their guests more room. But some members also decided to build their own “cottages” on the island, such as Cherokee, Crane, Indian Mound, Hollybourne, Mistletoe, DuBignon, Villa Ospo, and Villa Marianna.

 

These days, you can tour some of the “Millionaire Cottages,” as they’re known. You can also book rooms in others, like the Sans Souci, Cherokee, and Crane cottages.

Jekyll Island Club’s Historic Moments

Jekyll Island provided a more temperate clime and escape from the brutality of harsh northern winters. However, it wasn’t all sunshine and vacation time. With so many of the country’s leaders in one place, it also served as the site for some interesting American history to take place.

For instance, in 1910, it was where a group of them met somewhat clandestinely to “conceptualize a federal banking system” and “drafted the modern-day Federal Reserve.”

And five years later, in 1915, it would be where the nation’s first transcontinental phone call took place between President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, DC, Alexander Graham Bell in New York, Thomas Watson in San Francisco, Henry Higginson in Boston, and AT&T President Theodore Newton Vail at Jekyll Island Club.

As with the rise of all things, there usually also comes a fall. In the case of the exclusive Jekyll Island Club, two other historic moments played a major factor: the Great Depression and World War II.

The Depression took a toll on fortunes, and, as a result, the Club’s membership started to decline. In 1942, a German U-boat attacked U.S. merchant ships off the shores of neighboring St. Simons Island. It also sank another ship off of nearby Cumberland Island. The government ordered those on Jekyll to evacuate.

With the war raging, Club employees enlisted. Since there was no help and it was potentially dangerous to be on Jekyll, the Club never opened during the remaining war years. And then members abandoned it altogether, completely and totally. They even stopped paying taxes on the land.

Which is how the state of Georgia acquired it in 1948 as a public land trust. This is what led to Jekyll Island becoming accessible to everybody today.

Urbexers Re-Discover the Jekyll Island Club

In 1954 the addition of a drawbridge made the island more accessible. In 1978, the historic area of the island where the Millionaire Cottages and the Jekyll Island Club stood received Landmark District status. But the buildings weren’t being utilized.

Then I came to the 1985 part of the Jekyll Island Club Resort “History” timeline that floored me:

After a decade of neglect and abandonment, two friends, one a lawyer, the other an architect, climbed through an unlocked window and fell in love with the deteriorating Clubhouse. Together, they planned to preserve and renovate The Club to its original splendor and re-open it as a hotel.

Normally urbexers make news for making startling discoveries, like finding bones or bodies. Or for getting arrested. Most also kind of like perpetuating the image of being rebels and living on the fringe, so they don’t always get a good rap.

I feel like a time traveler when I visit the island, surrounded by Gilded Age ghosts. It’s marvelous. That’s why the story of how the Jekyll Island Club was reborn and revitalized caught me by surprise. I never dreamed I’d essentially have urbexers to thank for that. Luckily, I do. And so does everyone else who loves it.

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Have you ever visited Jekyll Island?