![]() Simons to reach the 5-mile-long barrier island. Sea Island was purchased back in 1927 by Howard Coffin, who built a causeway from St. Many of the cottages are open to visitors today, and all the attractions that drew the wealthy are now public property. In 1947, second-generation members of the Jekyll Island Club sold the exclusive Millionaires' Village to the state of Georgia for $675,000. They bought it for $125,000 and built "cottages" with 15 to 25 rooms and a clubhouse large enough to accommodate 100 members. In the late 1880s, the Golden Isles got into the resort business when a group of Yankee millionaires discovered Jekyll Island. The plantations languished and finally disappeared in the post-Civil War period. The last slaver, the Wanderer, (illegally) landed its cargo of Africans on Jekyll Island as late as 1858. Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior.The islands became world famous for their Sea Island cotton, grown on huge plantations supported mainly by slave labor. Since then it has been managed and administered by the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson made Blackbeard Island a wildlife preserve, and in 1924 the island was permanently established as a national wildlife refuge. ![]() In 1914 an executive order signed by U.S. The Blackbeard quarantine station was deactivated in 1909, after vaccines developed by Walter Reed and others had practically eliminated yellow fever. By 1900 shipping around Blackbeard Island and Sapelo Sound began making a transition from wooden, sail-powered vessels to steamships designed to accommodate larger timber cargoes. Beginning in 1889, Sapelo Sound, with its natural deep harbor, became the preferred anchorage for vessels engaged in the timber trade. The peak of the island’s activity as a quarantine station was reached in 1900, largely because of the processing of yellow pine timber from the numerous sawmills around nearby Darien. Marine hospital records do not note that this device was ever used for its intended purpose-to cremate the bodies of yellow fever victims. In 1904 a brick crematory was built it is the only structure from the quarantine era that still remains on Blackbeard Island. The disinfecting station, built on wharves extending into Sapelo Sound from Blackbeard’s north end, was composed of tanks and a rail track to expedite the removal of ballast stone from the holds of ships contaminated by yellow fever. The report noted that ninety vessels called at Blackbeard from foreign and domestic ports to undergo disinfecting and quarantine.ĭisinfecting Wharves on Blackbeard Islandįrom Images from the History of the Public Health Service, by R. ![]() ![]() Other employees included a drayman, a carpenter, a stockman for the station’s small herd of cattle, a cook, a laundress, a head surgeon, an assistant surgeon, and a male nurse. There was an engineer to operate the launch and another in charge of the ballast removal and disinfecting station on the north end of the island. A launch, the Hygeia, was used to disinfect ships and their ballasts as well as to transfer people from the north and south ends of the island. The report noted a surgeon’s hospital on the south end of Blackbeard. ![]() southern Atlantic ports were required to report to Blackbeard for inspection and, if necessary, disinfection.Īn 1894 Marine Hospital Service inspection report noted that the Blackbeard Island quarantine station comprised thirteen buildings and twenty-three employees. Yellow fever, typically spread by mosquitoes, was usually introduced to the American mainland by ships arriving from tropical Caribbean waters. The quarantine station was built in response to the yellow fever epidemic of 1876, which claimed 1,000 lives in Savannah alone. Marine Hospital Service opened the South Atlantic Quarantine Station at Blackbeard Island to monitor oceangoing shipping entering the Georgia ports of Savannah, Darien, and Brunswick. Fish and Wildlife ServiceĮxcept for occasional leasing by the federal government for cattle stocking, Blackbeard Island saw little further use until after the Civil War (1861-65). ![]()
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