Eighty miles south of Savannah lies St. Simons Island, one of the most beloved seaside destinations in Georgia and home to some twenty thousand year-round residents. In "Island Time," Jingle Davis and Benjamin Galland offer a fascinating history and stunning visual celebration of this coastal community.
Prehistoric people established some of North America's first permanent settlements on St. Simons, leaving three giant shell rings as evidence of their occupation. People from other diverse cultures also left their mark: Mocama and Guale Indians, Spanish friars, pirates and privateers, British soldiers and settlers, German religious refugees, and aristocratic antebellum planters. Enslaved Africans and their descendants forged the unique Gullah Geechee culture that survives today. Davis provides a comprehensive history of St. Simons, connecting its stories to broader historical moments. Timbers for Old Ironsides were hewn from St. Simons's live oaks during the Revolutionary War. Aaron Burr fled to St. Simons after killing Alexander Hamilton. Susie Baker King Taylor became the first black person to teach openly in a freedmen's school during her stay on the island. Rachel Carson spent time on St. Simons, which she wrote about in "The Edge of the Sea."
The island became a popular tourist destination in the 1800s, with visitors arriving on ferries until a causeway opened in 1924. Davis describes the challenges faced by the community with modern growth and explains how St. Simons has retained the unique charm and strong sense of community that it is known for today. Featuring more than two hundred contemporary photographs, historical images, and maps, "Island Time" is an essential book for people interested in the Georgia coast.
A Friends Fund Publication.

Although it is among the smallest of Georgia’s Golden Isles, Jekyll Island boasts a depth of history rivaling that of its larger neighbours. The island embraces two National Historic Landmarks, a listing reserved for the nation’s most significant treasures. More than fifty archaeological sites have been excavated on Jekyll; others remain unexplored, including an Indian burial mound discovered recently on the grounds of a beachfront motel. Written in a lively, accessible style by Jingle Davis and lavishly illustrated with photographs by Benjamin Galland, Island Passages is a solid work of public history that presents a carefully researched document of Jekyll Island, Georgia, from its geologic beginning as a shifting sand spit to its present-day ownership by the state of Georgia. While many books have been published about Jekyll, most focus on specific erasor episodes of island history—such as the Jekyll Island Club, the landing of the slaveship Wanderer, and the DuBignon family dynasty. Davis and Galland’s book makes an important contribution to the island’s literature because it synthesizes all these aspects into a comprehensive and beautifully executed history that will appeal to coastal and island history aficionados and the general reader alike.

Following the Tabby Trail provides a guided tour of some of the most significant tabby structures found along the southeastern coast and includes more than two hundred illustrations that highlight the human and architectural histories of forty-eight specific sites. Jingle Davis explains how tabby-a unique oyster-shell concrete-helps us to understand the complex past of the coast. A tabby structure is, as the author puts it, "a storehouse of history." Each of the site descriptions includes the intriguing profile of a historic figure associated in some way with the tabby. Though the first documented use of tabby in North America was in 1672 in what is now St. Augustine, Florida, Spanish colonists had used many of its constituent parts a century earlier. In addition to their Spanish-speaking competitors, colonizers from France and the British Isles also enthusiastically adopted the building material for their colonial missions. This meant, of course, that enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples built with the material. Tabby remained a fashionable, effective, and enduring building material until shortly after the Civil War. This richly photographed work provides readers with a guide to the underexplored string of tabby structures still standing along the stretch of coast between Florida and South Carolina, an approximately 275-mile trail traced by the book from just south of St. Augustine north to the dead town of Dorchester near Summerville. Sites include such varied structures as ancient Late Archaic shell mounds called middens and rings of shells thousands of years old; Fort Matanzas, built in 1742 but named for a sixteenth-century massacre of French colonists by St. Augustine's Spanish founder Pedro Menendez de Aviles; Fort Mose, a significant feature of Florida's Black Heritage Trail; and homes of the enslaved, warehouses, Charleston's seawall, churches, and cemeteries.