Island History

Skidaway Island is an interior Atlantic Ocean island located slightly southeast of Savannah, Georgia between the Wilmington, Skidaway and Vernon Rivers. The Island was originally settled several thousand years ago by the Native Americans and eventually taken over by Colonial settlers from England.

Skidaway’s name, however, is a theory under debate even today. Some believe that the Island’s name came from references from early Colonial settlers trying to pronounce a native form of Skidaway, since the Island has been called other variations of Skidaway like Skeedowa, Skeadoway and Skidowa. Others believe that the Island’s name was strictly English with a nautical reference. When the sail is released, sea goers yell, “Sheet away.” And for an even more English version, there is also a place in England on the Chatham River called Skedway.¹

Over the past one or two centuries, the history of Skidaway Island is somewhat sparse with many loopholes.¹ The natives who first inhabited the Island were eventually all either driven out by Oglethorpe and his followers or ravaged by English plagues and disease. During the Revolutionary War, a small skirmish took place on Skidaway. Between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War, the Island saw relative prosperity with a population and plantation production boom. Cotton, corn, cattle, indigo and hogs were in abundant production until the Fourth Georgia Battery could no longer hold off a Union blockade. Skidaway was then practically abandoned until the end of the Civil War when black freedmen set up a school with the help of the Benedictine Monks who had called the Island home for several decades. The Island flourished again during Prohibition in the 1920s. Skidaway was a smuggler’s paradise with its remote location and light population.

In the war-torn, antebellum period of the South, Northern interests gained control of Skidaway Island. Union Camp (then called Union Bag and Paper Corporation) used the Island for pulpwood production in the 1940s and by the 1960s, had plans for residential development. In the 1970s, Union Camp donated several hundred acres to the state for a park and the building of a bridge and road to Skidaway. Thus, Union Camp developed the area into a gated community and The Landings was born.² Now, a little more than thirty years later, many residents feel a strong but quiet determination to keep the Island as untouched and natural as possible.¹

Footnotes

¹Kelly, V.E. (1994). A Short History of Skidaway Island. V.E. Kelly and The Branigar Organization, Inc.
²Lenz, Richard J. Longstreet Highroad Guide to the Georgia Coast & Okefenokee. Retrieved March 30, 2007. http://www.sherpaguides.com/georgia/coast/northern_coast/skidaway_island.html.