Arriving on Georgia’s Jekyll Island, one might conclude that its storied past has been erased. From the Gilded Age until World War II, it was a private club owned by 100 multimillionaires, accessible only by yacht, which included J. Pierpont Morgan’s Corsair, Willie Vanderbilt’s Alva, and Vincent Astor’s Nourmahal. (Other members could take the club’s private steamboat.) Today, it’s a state park, approached by a modern causeway, just over a bridge and past a toll booth that charges $10 to enter the barrier island. Near the Atlantic Ocean, where the club once commanded attention, is now a traffic circle with a generic convention center to the north, a strip of undistinguished chain hotels to the south, and a couple blocks of stores offering souvenirs, BBQ, beach gear, bait and tackle, and Georgia delicacies like pralines and peach preserves.
At 9 a.m. on a sunny, humid April weekday, a couple in Trump-branded regalia eat breakfast outside the Sunrise Grille; a family browse pastel T-shirts promoting alcoholism; and beyond a dune bridge, a few kids cavort on the broad, empty beach. There, 125 years ago, Gilded Age giants named Morgan, Rockefeller, and Pulitzer, their arrival announced with cannonades and accompanied by families, horses, and hunting hounds, took the sea air on an island seven miles long and one-and-a-half wide. Though they owned Jekyll, they only visited it—and similar winter resorts like horsey Aiken, South Carolina—from January to March. In summer, an informal but circumscribed resort circuit took them and their ilk to cooler climes: islands off the coast of New England or estates in the Berkshire Mountains. During the in-between months, the upper classes took the waters in the mineral and hot springs of the Allegheny mountains.
Not much besides diamonds are forever, however, and the story of Jekyll Island’s rise, its moment in the sun, its precipitous fall from grace, and lately, a significant attempt to revive it, mirrors the evolution of America’s society of wealth. As the great fortunes of the original, post–Civil War Gilded Age were accumulated, spent, and then nibbled away, new exemplars of success—conglomerateurs, leveraged buyout specialists, private equity executives, hedge funders, and infotainment and tech moguls—have clambered to the top of the peaks of wealth, dragging their tastes in status symbols up with them. Some resort towns, notably Newport, Rhode Island, and Palm Beach, survived and even prospered, and continue to attract the wealthiest winners of America’s second Gilded Age.
But the great majority, from the hot-springs resorts of West Virginia to the coastal islands of Maine, now seem relics of the past, victims of evolving tastes and financial realities, new modes of travel, and the ever-changing whims of fashion. But while the great resorts of the Gilded Age may be mostly forgotten, they’re not gone; rather, they are geographical palimpsests—faded yet persistent, if still haunted by the ghosts of their grand past lives.
At the turn of the 20th century, The New York Times kept a “Social Notes” column, detailing the comings and goings of high society. A look back at these records reveals how many of that era’s high-end travel destinations have gone the way of the printing press. On June 4, 1893, George Vanderbilt was reported to be spending part of his summer at “his Southern palace” in Asheville, North Carolina, while Mrs. William Cary, Jr. was taking “the Sedgwick place” in Lenox, Massachusetts. On October 5, 1902, the Mortimers of Tuxedo Park gave a dinner for guests including the Pierre Lorillards, Eleanor Jay, and J.J. Van Alen in Mortemar, their turreted, four-story mock Tudor cottage. On September 24, 1907, Col. and Mrs. Alfred Wagstaff joined Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Harry Lehr at the Homestead in Virginia Hot Springs. Six years later to the day, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, her mother, and sister announced plans to remain in Bar Harbor, Maine, “as long as the weather is favorable.”
Soon after, a series of blows pounded the gilded resorts of the late 19th century, beginning with the ratification of income taxes in 1913. For most, forcing the wealthy to share their winnings was a boon; but for the few, taxes were a cruel blow, making their grandiose homes unaffordable white elephants, their opulent lifestyles unsustainable. Like the revolutions that toppled monarchs in Europe, taxes changed everything.
After World War I, fashions in travel changed, too, and oceanside resorts like Antibes and Palm Beach gained prominence in the 1920s. Then came the Depression and World War II, and in their destructive wake, the tender sprouts of a new, more equitable society broke ground as the common men and women who’d fought for democracy made showing off, at least briefly, unseemly, if not an incitement to class hatred. The common man was not yet a king, but would no longer be nobody. By the time jet travel arrived in the years that followed, the Gilded Age magnets for the wealthy, famous, and powerful were falling off the travel map. By the 21st century, they were forgotten. After all, if one can travel to Thailand’s Amanpuri or Montenegro’s Uvala Trsteno, why settle for Virginia?
Many of the great resorts of the Gilded Age are rooted in early American history. The first, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, appeared on a map drawn by Thomas Jefferson’s father in 1747, a year before George Washington visited and named the town Bath. After independence, it was condemned as a “seat of sin,” due to its reputation as a place to party, gamble, and race quarter horses. Other nearby springs were still well remembered when Cleveland Amory, the Boston-bred social historian, began excavating their stories after World War II, dividing them up into living and ghost towns in his 1952 baedeker, The Last Resorts.
Like Palm Beach, some grand dame destinations—Newport, the Berkshires, Fishers and Jupiter islands, and Southampton—were still dancing, if on uncertain legs, when Amory visited. But among the country’s less resilient resorts were what Amory called the “Social Springs,” a circuit in the Allegheny Mountains between Virginia and West Virginia, where high elevations let visitors escape the summer heat, and mineral and thermal springs alleged to have therapeutic value, began attracting visitors from the South in the mid-18th century. A century later, the Northeast’s elite started arriving, too.
The waters became so popular that a turnpike was even laid from Warm Springs to Healing Springs, and eventually took in Hot, White, Red Sweet, Sweet, Salt Sulphur, Blue Sulphur, and more. Part of their allure were the Southern belles, who flocked there seeking wealthy husbands. But by the ’60s, the Springs fever had broken, belles appeared obsolete beside liberated women, and the social validation, vigorous relaxation, and relief from boredom their scene had offered began to seem insufficient. Still, the former British King Edward and Wallis Simpson, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, those reliquaries of extinct society (she a Southern belle herself), continued to visit The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, into the ’50s.
Founded in 1778, The Greenbrier attracted Southern society in the 1830s, and then added northerners after the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway came to town in 1873. That rail line acquired the resort in 1910, and soon added The Old White golf course. Though seaside resorts like Palm Beach were already on the rise, and Springs Society in decline, The Greenbrier kept growing into the 1930s, and though it temporarily closed down during World War II, it remains a golf destination today. The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, followed a similar trajectory after the first hotel on the property opened in 1766. In 1881, a syndicate that included J.P. Morgan bought the property, but it burned to the ground in 1901. Back in business a year later, it remains a landmark and maintains its historical bathhouses five miles away, the passing of that health fad notwithstanding.
A similar fate befell their Northern counterpart, Saratoga Springs, where a tavern built in 1802 grew into a grand hotel, quickly followed by more: a railroad, summer “cottages,” racing, gambling, and the likes of Diamond Jim Brady, Lily Langtry, and Bet-a-Million Gates. But Saratoga’s mineral springs were soon depleted, an anti-gambling movement in the early 20th century closed its famous casinos, and the Grand Union and United States hotels were torn down after World War II. Despite the arrival of the New York State Thruway in the ’60s, the persistence of its summer horse-racing season and brief summer stays by the New York City Ballet, the glamour of Saratoga Springs is long gone. It is now more a museum than a magnet of wealth
Tuxedo Park, the fenced-in enclave just north of New York City, likewise still stands, but is a shadow of its former self, with the values of its historic but aging cottages deep underwater. No wonder. Amory noted 70-plus years ago that the financial condition of the private club at the core of that community—offering golf, swimming, boating, and racquet sports, including rare “court” tennis facilities—was so desperate that it started renting spots to non-members, and its staff “view the present with distaste and the future with alarm.”
Fire rang the alarms for Bar Harbor, which became the most famous of Maine’s historic resort towns after its discovery by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole in 1844. In fall 1947, a third of the town’s cottages burnt down, though many hadn’t been occupied in years, perhaps because the featured attractions of the place were limited to taking walks, canoeing, searching for rocks on the shore of freezing Frenchman’s Bay, and humble-bragging about Maine’s clean air. Again, its epitaph was written by Amory: “Although it had a brief renaissance in the 1920s and staggered through the depression, it virtually disappeared when World War II gave marching orders to taxes, servants, and the Old Way of Life,” he wrote, twisting the knife by quoting a holdout swell who drank his way through summers there. “You couldn’t do it sober,” he said.
There are still Gilded Age resort hotels on Maine’s coast: Bar Harbor’s Cleftstone Manor (circa 1881), the 1884 Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, the Samoset Resort in Rockport, its 1889 premises rebuilt after a 1972 fire. And New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Resort, which dates back to the 1896 Bretton Arms Inn—still on the grounds—is full of history. Not only did guests include three U.S. presidents, Thomas Edison, and England’s Princess Margaret, but in 1944, at the Bretton Woods International Monetary Conference, delegates from 44 nations established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Like the Homestead, it is now owned by Omni Hotels & Resorts, which has invested $60 million in the property since acquiring it in 2015.
Though they still have their devotees, Bar Harbor and its environs are no longer magnets for fashion and social figures or business magnates. The contemporary analogue of its long-ago crowd congregates in Palm Beach, where chic restaurants, art galleries, sky-high real estate prices, and the presence of a new generation of brand-name heirs and luxury boutiques prove the lasting appeal of sunny places by the ocean. Thanks to the alchemy of its geographic good fortune (it’s a tropical island enclave, yet still on the American mainland), and its elite atmosphere (the absence of state income taxes, to play on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, offers the consoling proximity to other billionaires), the barrier island is clearly thriving.
Still, at least one of America’s old-school resorts is poised to defy the epitaph, refusing to be a shadow of its gilded past.
Read the full story in the new issue of PALMER On the Road, available now.