The Wanderer slipped through the channel off Jekyll Island under cover of darkness in November 1858. A 114-foot racing schooner, one of the fastest yachts in America, flying the pennant of the New York Yacht Club as a decoy, it had left the coast of Africa six weeks earlier with more than 400 kidnapped men and boys from the Kingdom of Congo crammed into a hold designed for pleasure cruises. Roughly 70 to 90 of them had died during the crossing, thrown overboard at the first sign of illness. The importation of enslaved Africans had been illegal since 1808, and by 1820 it was a crime punishable by death.

But a Savannah businessman named Charles Lamar had organized the voyage anyway, a deliberate act of political defiance against the federal government. Lamar was one of the fire-eaters, wealthy southern radicals who wanted to provoke war between North and South. The island had been a stage for trouble long before the millionaires arrived. Jekyll Island sits about five miles off the coast of Brunswick, Georgia, nine miles long and barely a mile and a half wide, laced with live oaks and salt marsh.

General James Oglethorpe, who founded the colony of Georgia in 1733, named it after Sir Joseph Jekyll, an English financier who had bankrolled the colony. Oglethorpe stationed a military man there, Major William Horton, to build an outpost protecting Fort Frederica on nearby St. Simons Island. Horton also started what is believed to be Georgia’s first brewery, using a great copper pot to produce beer on a plantation worked by indentured servants.

By the late 1700s, a French family, the du Bignons, had taken control. Kristoff du Bignon, a royalist fleeing the revolution, traded other Georgia holdings for Jekyll and turned it into a cotton plantation. His descendants held it for nearly a century. Henry du Bignon and John Eugene du Bignon, members of the family that owned Jekyll, were friends of Lamar.

They helped land the captives on the beach. Doctors examined the survivors. Many were boys, some bearing tattoos and tribal scars. An enslaved man already on the island served as translator.

The captives were scattered across plantations and slave markets throughout the South, sold for as much as $700 each. One survivor, Ward Lee, was ten years old when he was taken. Federal authorities eventually arrested Lamar and his co-conspirators, but the trial in federal court in Savannah in the summer of 1860 ended with not one conviction. The all-southern jury refused to punish men for doing what half of them believed should never have been made illegal.

Two of the surviving captives were exhibited at the South Carolina State Fair in 1859 as if they were livestock. Two years after the Wanderer landed, the country was at war, exactly as Lamar had wanted. The Wanderer itself was seized by the Union Army, fitted with deck guns, and turned against its makers. It sank off the coast of Cuba in 1871.

After the Civil War, Jekyll reverted to what it had been before the cotton and the conspiracy: a remote island, overgrown, nearly forgotten. That is when two men saw their opening. Newton Finney was a New Yorker, a member of the Union Club, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive gentlemen’s societies. His brother-in-law, John Eugene du Bignon, was the fourth-generation family owner of Jekyll Island.

Du Bignon had spent the years after the war quietly buying out every other family member’s claim until by 1885 he held the entire island. Their plan was elegant in its simplicity. Finney would sell the dream to the richest man in New York. Du Bignon would deliver the island.

The pitch was irresistible: a private winter retreat accessible only by boat, warm enough to escape the northern cold from January through April, stocked with game, surrounded by salt air and silence, and critically far from reporters, politicians, and the public. On December 9, 1885, they incorporated the Jekyll Island Club in Glynn County, Georgia, and offered 100 shares at $600 apiece. Finney had no difficulty finding buyers. The names in the first round read like the index of a Gilded Age history: J.

P. Morgan, the most powerful private banker in the United States; Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper baron; William K. Vanderbilt, heir to one of the largest fortunes in American history; Marshall Field, who had built the greatest department store in Chicago; Henry Hyde, founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Within weeks, 53 men had bought in.

In February 1886, the club purchased the entire island from du Bignon for $125,000, roughly $3. 8 million today. These were men who could have spent that much on a dinner party without blinking. Construction on the clubhouse began in mid-August 1886, designed by Chicago architect Charles Alexander, with grounds laid out by landscape architect Horace William Shaler Cleveland.

The club’s first president, Lloyd Aspinwall, died just five months after taking office in September 1886, more than a year before the building he had commissioned was finished. Henry Howland replaced him, and on January 21, 1888, the Jekyll Island Club opened its doors for its first season. The clubhouse was a Queen Anne masterpiece: wood and brick, wraparound verandas on multiple levels, heart-pine floors, Rumford fireplaces, and a distinctive turret that became the island’s visual signature, visible from the water as arriving yachts approached the wharf. Members traveled from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago by private rail car to the station in Brunswick, then crossed to the island by steam launch or private yacht.

There were no telephones in the early years, no automobiles until 1900, when a gasoline car first disturbed the island’s quiet glades the day after Christmas, an event that dismayed several members who preferred the sound of hooves. The isolation was the point. These men spent their days hunting, riding beneath the ancient oaks, playing tennis, and, most importantly, talking to each other. Business, politics, investments, legislation.

The conversations happening on those verandas and in that dining room may have shaped more American commerce than any boardroom in Manhattan, because on Jekyll, the men who ran competing empires sat down together over brandy with no witnesses. Within a few years, members started building what they politely called cottages. These were not cottages. William Rockefeller, brother of John D.

and co-founder of Standard Oil, built Indian Mound, a 25-room shingled mansion that took nearly a decade to complete, with nine bedrooms, nine bathrooms, seven servants’ rooms, an elevator, a cedar-lined walk-in safe, and hot and cold saltwater taps on the bathtub in the master bedroom. J. P. Morgan and five other members put up Sans Souci, French for “without care,” a three-story, six-unit apartment building that architectural historians now regard as one of the first condominiums ever built in the United States.

Henry Kirk Porter, the locomotive manufacturer and YMCA co-founder, built Mistletoe Cottage in 1900 with one of the first private elevators in a southern residence. Faith Chapel, a small Gothic Revival church with stained glass and replicas of four gargoyles from Notre-Dame de Paris, went up in 1904 so that members could worship without leaving the island. Visiting clergy of multiple denominations rotated through on invitation. Membership was capped at 100, admission was by invitation only, and non-members were not permitted on the island, period.

When members traveled to Jekyll, they used first names only to avoid recognition by train staff or hotel employees along the route. Reporters were turned away. For a few months each winter, a population smaller than a city block controlled a share of the world’s wealth that entire nations could not match, and nobody outside knew what they discussed. That secrecy is exactly why, on a cold November night in 1910, a group of men chose Jekyll Island for something that would have been impossible anywhere else.

Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. , boarded a privately chartered rail car in Hoboken, New Jersey, with five other men. They used only first names.

They carried borrowed shotguns. They told anyone who asked that they were going duck hunting off the coast of Georgia. Their rifles were props. The real purpose was to draft a plan to fundamentally restructure the American banking system, and they needed total secrecy to do it.

If the press discovered that a United States senator was huddled with representatives of the Morgan and Rockefeller banking empires writing financial legislation together, the political damage would have been fatal. Public sentiment in 1910 ran hard against Wall Street concentration. The five men traveling with Aldrich were A. Piatt Andrew, the assistant secretary of the treasury; Henry Davison, a senior partner at J.

P. Morgan and Company; Arthur Shelton, Aldrich’s personal secretary; Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank, today’s Citibank; and Paul Warburg, a German-born partner at Kuhn, Loeb and Company, who had been studying European central banking systems for years and was the group’s intellectual engine. A member of the Jekyll Island Club, almost certainly Morgan himself, arranged for them to use the club’s facilities during the off-season. For roughly nine days, the six men ate, argued, and wrote.

They had Thanksgiving dinner of wild turkey with oyster stuffing at the clubhouse. They debated the structure of a central banking body that could issue elastic currency, act as a lender of last resort during panics, and regulate the reserves of member banks. They were haunted by the Panic of 1907, which had nearly collapsed the entire financial system and had been stopped only by J. P.

Morgan’s personal intervention, Morgan literally locking bankers in a room until they agreed to pull their money. The country had survived on one man’s willpower, and that man was now old. What happened when Morgan was gone? The plan they drafted became known as the Aldrich Plan.

The journalist B. C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, somehow learned of the meeting in 1917 and published a brief mention, but almost no one noticed. The participants denied the meeting had occurred for 20 years.

It was not until 1930, after Senator Carter Glass of Virginia published a book claiming sole credit for the Federal Reserve, that Vanderlip, Warburg, and Andrew finally came forward to confirm the Jekyll Island Conference to Aldrich’s biographer. Warburg, especially furious, published a two-volume book in 1930 that included a line-by-line comparison showing how closely the final Federal Reserve Act of December 1913 mirrored the Aldrich Plan they had written on Jekyll Island. The original bill had been politically torpedoed because Aldrich’s name was on it; he was too closely identified with Wall Street. So the reformers regrouped, dropped Aldrich’s name, and had Virginia Congressman Carter Glass reintroduce essentially the same plan as a Democratic bill.

It passed overwhelmingly in December 1913. The structure was virtually identical to what those six men had drafted over Thanksgiving dinner three years earlier. The institution that today sets interest rates, manages inflation, and acts as lender of last resort was born in the dining room of a private hunting club on an island most Americans had never heard of, drafted by men using false names who denied it happened for two decades. Jekyll Island was not done making history.

On January 25, 1915, AT&T president Theodore Vail was wintering at the club when a technological milestone arrived at his doorstep, literally. Vail had spent years pushing AT&T to build a transcontinental telephone line, committing the company to finishing it in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. By 1914, workers had strung 4,750 miles of copper wire across deserts and mountains using horse-drawn wagons and early automobiles. Vail planned to participate in the inaugural call from AT&T’s offices in New York, but a leg injury kept him on Jekyll.

So he ordered 1,100 miles of copper cable run specifically to the island, one of the longest telephone line extensions ever built for a single occasion. On that January afternoon, sitting in a parlor of the Jekyll Island Clubhouse with J. P. Morgan Jr.

and William Rockefeller standing nearby, Vail joined a call connecting Alexander Graham Bell in New York, Thomas Watson in San Francisco, Henry Higginson in Boston, and President Woodrow Wilson at the White House. Bell repeated the words he had first transmitted in 1876: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.

” Watson, now 3,400 miles away, replied, “It would take me a week now. ” The telephone that would connect a democracy was inaugurated from the most inaccessible private club in the world. The club’s golden age ran from roughly 1919 to 1927. The Roaring Twenties hit Jekyll with full force.

Golf had replaced hunting as the island’s primary sport, and Walter J. Travis designed the Great Dunes Golf Course in 1926. Villa Ospo was designed in 1927 for Walter Jennings by John Russell Pope, the same architect who would later design the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. Villa Marianna, the last of 18 cottages, went up in 1928.

The most extravagant construction of the era belonged to Richard Teller Crane Jr. , whose family fortune came from manufacturing bathroom and plumbing fixtures. Crane Cottage was an Italian Renaissance palace with a landscaped sunken garden, elegant fountains, and a formal upper terrace. It cost around $500,000 to build at a time when a solid American house could be had for $5,000: 20 bedrooms, 17 bathrooms.

The man whose family made the fixtures wanted the finest plumbing on the island, and he got it. But Florida was pulling the wealthy southward. Miami, Palm Beach, newer resorts on warmer water with whiter sand and more fashionable social calendars offered what Jekyll could not: novelty. The men who founded the club had wanted solitude.

Their grandchildren wanted glamour. The club held its own through most of the 1920s, but the current was shifting. The 1929 stock market crash did not destroy the Jekyll Island Club in a single stroke; many of the families still had money. But the Depression changed the psychological atmosphere in which great wealth operated.

Maintaining a private island retreat felt conspicuous, even reckless, in a country where bread lines stretched around city blocks and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. The income tax, which had not existed when the club was founded, was now eating into fortunes that had once seemed limitless. And the generational shift was relentless: the heirs who had inherited memberships cared less about quail hunting and candlelit dinners. They wanted Miami.

They wanted Europe. Half the roster dropped away through the 1930s. The club continued to function, but the energy was draining out of it season by season. Fewer yachts at the wharf each January, fewer lights in the cottage windows.

Then came the war, and with it something no one on Jekyll Island had ever imagined: the enemy close enough to hear. The club closed its 1942 season in early April. Three days later, on April 8, the German submarine U-123 surfaced in the shallow waters just off St. Simons Island, the next barrier island north.

Its commander, Lieutenant Commander Reinhard Hardegen, had already killed American sailors earlier that year. Now he spotted the oil tanker SS Oklahoma silhouetted against the lights of the Georgia coast, lights that should have been blacked out under wartime orders but were not. Hardegen fired. The torpedo hit.

The 9,200-ton tanker erupted, and the blast shattered windows in pre-dawn Brunswick miles away. Less than an hour later, Hardegen sank a second tanker, the 8,000-ton Esso Baton Rouge. The following morning, he torpedoed a third ship, the SS Esparta, just south of Brunswick. Its cargo of oranges and foil-wrapped turkeys washed up on Jekyll’s north beach.

Twenty-three crewmen from the three ships were killed. Panic swept the Georgia coast. Rumors of a German landing spread through Brunswick and the surrounding towns. Coastal communities that had ignored blackout orders for months suddenly went dark.

The military moved fast. Army troops bivouacked on Jekyll Island itself, setting up watchtowers on the beach and using the club grounds for communications equipment and a dining mess. Coast Guard patrols circled the island for the rest of the war. Meanwhile, the club’s staff, the cooks, the groundskeepers, the laundry workers, the dock hands, scattered in every direction.

Many club employees left to serve in the armed forces or to work at the shipyards in Brunswick. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts did not leave because they were afraid of U-boats. They left because there was nobody left to serve them dinner. The cottages sat empty.

The club never reopened. Not after Normandy. Not after Berlin fell. Not after Japan surrendered.

For five years, a skeleton crew mowed the lawns and tried to hold back the jungle from the roads and buildings of an island nobody was using. Palmettos buckled the pavement. Paint peeled in sheets in the salt air. The powerhouse broke down.

The state of Georgia had been watching for years. Melvin Thompson, the state revenue commissioner, wanted a public beach park on the coast. When he unexpectedly became acting governor in 1947 amid a bitter succession dispute after the death of Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge, Thompson moved on Jekyll with startling speed. The remaining club members refused to sell.

Thompson did not ask twice. On October 7, 1947, the state of Georgia purchased Jekyll Island through condemnation, the legal power governments normally reserve for building highways. The price: $675,000. In 1886, 53 of the richest men in the world bought the island for $125,000.

Sixty-one years later, after building 18 mansions, a clubhouse, a chapel with Notre Dame gargoyles, a power plant, roads, a wharf, tennis courts, and a golf course; after hosting the secret creation of the Federal Reserve and the first transcontinental telephone call; after decades as the most exclusive retreat in American history, the entire thing sold for $675,000. The Crane Cottage alone had cost $500,000 to build 30 years earlier. The state got one of the most historically significant private properties in the country for less than the replacement cost of a single member’s vacation house. Jekyll Island State Park opened to the public in 1948.

Governor Thompson called it a playground that now belongs to every Georgian. The legislature created the Jekyll Island Authority in 1950 to run the island, but with a condition that would shape every decision for the next 75 years and counting: the island had to be financially self-sustaining. No state tax dollars. The authority raised revenue the only way it could, offering 99-year leases for individuals to build private homes on the island, constructing a convention center, and encouraging hotels along the oceanside.

In 1954, a drawbridge opened to the mainland, ending Jekyll’s physical isolation for the first time in its recorded history. The state’s attempt to operate the old clubhouse as a hotel failed; the entire complex closed by 1971. And then for more than a decade, the buildings that had housed the richest people on Earth sat empty, abandoned for the second time. Ivy climbed the turret.

Rain crept through rooflines. In 1971, the state legislature drew a line that still holds: 65 percent of the island must remain forever undeveloped, maritime forest, salt marsh, dunes, beach, locked away from builders by Georgia statute. A 2014 revision capped future development of untouched land to 78 acres, with only 20 available for unrestricted commercial use. Today roughly 60 untouched acres remain.

The island still has no traffic lights. Parking is not metered. The entry fee is ten dollars. Then came the strangest rescue in the island’s long history of strange events.

In the mid-1980s, a lawyer and an architect climbed through an unlocked window of the abandoned clubhouse and fell in love with what they found inside. The heart-pine floors were intact. The Rumford fireplaces, the leaded glass, the bones of Charles Alexander’s 1886 design were still structurally sound beneath the decay. They proposed a restoration.

Days Inns signed on. After a $20 million renovation, the Jekyll Island Club Hotel reopened in 1986. Today the turret still rises above the live oaks. You can book a room in the clubhouse for two or three hundred dollars a night.

The Crane Cottage has 13 guest rooms. Cherokee Cottage has 10. Sans Souci still has its original skylight, its original art glass, its original stairway. Faith Chapel still stands among the oaks with its gargoyle replicas.

Indian Mound, Rockefeller’s 25-room mansion with its cedar-lined safe and saltwater bathtub taps, served for years as the island museum. The Georgia Sea Turtle Center, which opened in 2007 inside the old power plant that once kept the millionaires’ lights burning, now rehabilitates injured loggerheads. The power plant that ran on coal for the Rockefellers now runs on conservation for everyone. There is a memorial trail on the south end of the island near St.

Andrews Beach, where the Wanderer unloaded its human cargo in 1858. UNESCO has designated it a site of memory under a project tracking the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The beach is public now. The same sand where enslaved boys from the Congo were examined by doctors and sold for $700 each is where families spread towels and children build sandcastles.

For 56 years, the richest men in America used this island to escape the country they had built. They needed a place where no one could reach them, where exclusivity itself was the product they were buying. They built mansions and called them cottages. They designed the central bank of the United States in secret because they knew the public would never accept the truth of who wrote it.

They inaugurated the transcontinental telephone from behind locked doors. They spent enormous fortunes making sure that this one island, nine miles long, stayed exclusively theirs. And then they left, gradually and then completely. The Depression thinned them.

Florida distracted them. The war scattered them. The heirs did not love what their grandfathers had built because they had not built it. And when the island sat empty long enough, the state of Georgia showed up and took it, the same way a government takes a strip of farmland for a highway.

The turret of the clubhouse still rises above the oaks, draped in the same Spanish moss that hung there when Oglethorpe named the island, when du Bignon planted cotton, when the Wanderer beached in the dark, when Morgan smoked cigars on the veranda, when Aldrich pretended to hunt ducks, when Vail heard cheers crackling across a copper wire from San Francisco, when a German torpedo blew out windows in Brunswick, when palmetto roots split the roads of an empty paradise. The turret is visible from the causeway as you cross over from the mainland. You pay your ten dollars. You drive in.

No traffic lights. No one asks your name.