Skidaway Island
Additional Information
Skidaway Island is located on the Georgia coast 12 miles from Savannah, GA. A birding paradise for the advad birder, this island is home to The Landings (originally a retirement community, now a meca for young families) and Skidaway Island State Park. Wildlife is abundant on this island!
Encircled by rivers and creeks, affluent Skidaway Island has large homes and golf courses. Trails meander through forest and alongside marshes in Skidaway Island State Park, which offers an oak-sheltered campsite. Made up of 3 Atlantic barrier islands, Wassaw National Wildlife Refuge is only accessible by boat. Its beaches and wetlands attract loggerhead turtles, wood storks, and migratory birds like painted bunting.
Elevation: 10′
Population: 8,783 (2018)
Area: 17.9 mi² (16.4 mi² Land / 1.5 mi² Water)
On the island you'll find a gas station, grocery store, small retail stores, churches, and banks. All of these services are accessible via car, bike, golf cart or walking.
Learn More about The Landings
The Landings Club on Skidaway Island is a private luxury golf club dedicated to serving members with an active lifestyle and resort-class amenities in a vacation setting. Located 12 miles from historic Savannah, Georgia, The Landings Club offers members access to six championship golf courses, two marinas, 33 tennis courts, seven restaurants, five swimming pools and an innovative fitness and wellness center. To learn more about The Landings Club lifestyle, the exceptional cuisine and our luxury gated golf community, please explore the website or contact our membership office.
Additional Information from Wikipedia
Skidaway Island was originally a hunting and ceremonial ground of the Timucua Indians. European settlement of the island was successful between 1754 and 1771, and included John Milledge (the father of John Milledge), who established a plantation on the northern end. He named it "Modena," presumably after the Italian city for its famed production of silk. Silk was an early industry of the European settlers of coastal Georgia. The Modena Plantation grew corn, cotton, oranges and mulberry trees, and kept sheep, cattle, hogs and horses. It survived as a plantation into the 1840s, until John Milledge III sold it in 1843. The name "Modena" is still used to refer to the northern part of the island.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865), many of the plantations on the island were unable to continue without slave labor, and their owners gradually sold them to wealthy northerners, who mostly held them on speculation. Much of the island reverted to wilderness and was used mainly for hunting, trapping, fishing and lumber for several decades. The Modena Plantation changed hands sixteen more times after the war. In 1927 the property became a private hunting preserve for Ralph H. Isham, best known for purchasing a collection of James Boswell's private papers from Baron Talbot of Malahide and passing them to Yale University.
Mr. Isham sold the property in 1934 to Robert C. Roebling (great-grandson of John Augustus Roebling). The Roebling family (Robert, Dorothy, and five children) established a farm for Black Angus cattle while living on their 176-foot (54 m) schooner, the Black Douglas, which provided all of the power needed by the farm until it was sold in 1941 to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The cattle farm was very successful for the next twenty years, until it came to an end in 1954 due to post-WWII economic pressures. Many of the buildings from the farm are still standing and in use by SkIO, most notably the seven-sided barn with its compass rose mosaic at the center.
Another successful European settler of the mid-18th century was Henry Yonge, who had a plantation located just southeast of Modena, called Orangedale. In 1877 it came into the ownership of the Benedictine Order. The Benedictines tried to establish a monastery and Catholic school for the newly freed former slaves on the island, but were unsuccessful. They abandoned their efforts in 1889. The "Priest tract," as the property had come to be called, became one of many acquired by a partnership of Thomas Bourke Floyd, James Boog Floyd, and A. Goden Guerard Jr. Thomas Floyd eventually assumed ownership of the entire middle portion of the island, until economic hardship forced a transfer to C&S Bank in 1924. The Union Camp Corporation purchased it from the bank in 1941.