Jekyll Island Club, Georgia

Jekyll is one of the Golden Isles of Georgia, the barrier islands used as resorts by America’s Gilded Age elite. The Jekyll Island Club, in the middle of the island, has dozens of structures preserved as historic sites, including the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, one of the grandest old resort buildings in the USA. It is surrounded by mansion-sized winter vacation homes. Privately developed in the late 1800s, the club included Vanderbilts, Astors, Whitneys, Goulds, Goodyears, and Rockefellers in its membership. The Island is famous as the place where the Federal Reserve System was born, due to a secret meeting of private bankers that took place there in 1910, arranged  by Senator Nelson Aldrich, the outcome of which was the Aldrich Plan, used to restructure the nation’s monetary system in 1913. Despite the new system, the club, like the country, was soon devastated by the Great Depression, and never recovered. The Island was bought by the State of Georgia in 1947 and is now managed as a privately operated public park. Then head of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, visited the island in 2010 to commemorate the Fed’s centennial.