The Gilded Age’s Most Exclusive Playground
In 1904, Munsey’s Magazine conducted a survey of the private playgrounds of America’s wealthiest elite and crowned Jekyll Island as the richest, most exclusive, and most inaccessible club in the world. This accolade was hardly an exaggeration. The membership roster of the Jekyll Island Club was capped at a hundred shares and read like a who’s who of Gilded Age titans: J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, William K. Vanderbilt, Marshall Field, Joseph Pulitzer, the Astors, and the Goulds. Collectively, these men represented a significant portion of global wealth during their era, and their gatherings on Jekyll Island symbolized a concentration of power and privilege rarely seen before.
What united these magnates was not just their financial empires but a shared winter retreat on a nine-mile barrier island off the coast of Georgia, purchased in its entirety in 1886 for $125,000. This island, a lush expanse of live oaks, marshlands, and pristine beaches, became their sanctuary from public scrutiny and the press.
The World’s Most Exclusive Hunting Lodge
The island originally belonged to the du Bignon family, French émigrés who had cultivated cotton there for a century. In a strategic move orchestrated by John Eugene du Bignon and his brother-in-law Newton Finney, ownership was consolidated specifically to market the island as a private winter resort for northern capitalists. Finney sold a hundred shares at $600 each in New York, effectively delivering a secluded wilderness complete with servants to the new owners.
The club’s turreted clubhouse opened in January 1888, marking the beginning of a private season that lasted from January to April. During these months, families arrived by yacht and private railcar to partake in pheasant shooting, horseback riding beneath ancient oaks, and fine dining among their peers—safely insulated from the public eye. Eighteen members constructed shingled mansions they modestly termed “cottages.”
The island’s social and economic influence was profound. In November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich clandestinely brought Wall Street bankers to the island under false pretenses to draft the blueprint for what would become the Federal Reserve System. Additionally, in January 1915, Theodore Vail, president of AT&T and a winter club member, participated in the first transcontinental telephone call, connected from Jekyll Island alongside Washington, New York, and San Francisco.
How Empires End
The decline of the Jekyll Island Club was a case of ordinary economics confronting extraordinary wealth. The Great Depression depleted the membership as heirs showed less interest in the club’s traditions. World War II delivered the final blow: the 1942 season ended prematurely amid wartime uncertainty and staff shortages, and the clubhouse shuttered, never to reopen. For five years, a skeleton crew maintained the grounds of an otherwise empty island, while palmetto roots began to buckle the roads.
Meanwhile, the state of Georgia had been observing the island with growing interest. Melvin Thompson, the state revenue commissioner who later became governor in 1947, saw potential in transforming Jekyll Island into a public beach park. Despite objections from the club’s remaining members, Georgia exercised condemnation powers—a legal mechanism typically reserved for infrastructure projects—to acquire the island.
On October 7, 1947, Georgia officially took ownership of Jekyll Island for $675,000. This acquisition included the clubhouse, cottages, wharf, and the entire nine miles of the island, valued roughly at the cost of a single member’s yacht during the club’s heyday. The court-ordered dissolution of the millionaires’ club marked the end of an era.
The People’s Gilded Age
Governor Thompson hailed the purchase as a bargain for the people of Georgia, though he endured considerable political backlash. Critics derided it as “Thompson’s folly,” an extravagant expense for a state that had to build a causeway to enable public access. Nevertheless, the Jekyll Island State Park opened in 1948, and in 1950, the state legislature created the Jekyll Island Authority to oversee its operations. The construction of the drawbridge a few years later ended the island’s long-standing inaccessibility—the club’s most jealously guarded asset.
The island’s transformation has not been without challenges. The state-run resort that replaced the private club struggled financially, leading to the closure of the clubhouse complex in 1971. However, the area gained recognition as a National Historic Landmark district, and restoration efforts in the 1980s revived the clubhouse as a hotel where guests can now stay in quarters once reserved for the Morgans and other Gilded Age magnates.
Today, Georgia law limits development on the island, preserving roughly two-thirds of Jekyll as undeveloped wilderness. The Jekyll Island Authority continuously balances revenue generation with conservation, a topic that remains a lively subject of debate among Georgians.
The most remarkable legacy of Jekyll Island is its dramatic reversal: an island once accessible only to an elite few is now a public park with beaches open to everyone. The Gilded Age cottages function as a museum district, and the club’s secretive history—including the drafting of the Federal Reserve plan—is now part of a public narrative. The economics speak plainly—after holding the island for 56 years, the world’s richest club realized a 440 percent paper profit, yet the state’s $675,000 purchase gave the public access to the very exclusivity the club once sold. Condemnation, in this case, was the ultimate repeal of exclusivity.
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