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| Intrepid Trekker Leaves Homestead |
This was a very long first day of traveling through the piney woods and peanut fields of Southern Alabama and Southern Georgia. The trip was one of the few days of familiar territory on the trek, and I made no long stops. Jekyll Island is Nature Land as the Disney folks would do it. Though there is some residential development, most of the island is laid out to hide improvements with foliage and to limit lines of sight with curving roads. I have driven around most of the island and I have seen some marshland, but have yet to see the ocean. Jekyll Island spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries as an exclusive playground for rich folks. Membership in the Jekyll Island Club, which owned the island, was limited to 100 families that included the Morgans, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. The member families and their guests used the island for hunting, golfing, carriage riding and tennis. The depression years and World War II brought on financial strains that could not be met by the members, and it was purchased by the State of Georgia in 1947. It is now a state park, and the previous exclusivity has been replaced by full public assess. I am enjoying the full fruits of that public access by tent camping in the public campground at the northern end of the island.
Jekyll Island also interests me because of its role in American financial history. Prior to 1913 the United States did not have a central bank to regulate banks and to step in when the financial markets were hit with a panic. The 1907 panic demonstrated the limits of the banking system in handling a panic. The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee at the time, Nelson Aldrich (grandfather of Vice President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller), assembled a group of six prominent bankers who met in secret at the Jekyll Island Club in November 1910 and they developed the first draft of the legislation for the Federal Reserve System. Aldrich took the draft to Washington and used it to champion the cause for a central bank, which resulted in adoption of the legislation in 1913. The activity of the Jekyll Island Seven was so secret that it was not acknowledged to have occurred until 1930. Image being able to do that in the internet age.
Mileage 455. Today's earworm: "What a Wonderful World".
