The Great Copper Pot

How Georgia’s first brewery was born

BY REBECCA BURNS

In March 1733, merchant Samuel Eveleigh journeyed from Charleston (then Charles Town) to the fledgling colony of Georgia and was impressed by residents’ temperance under the leadership of James Oglethorpe. “I never saw one of his people drunk,” wrote Eveleigh.

Indeed, when English trustees founded Georgia, they issued a prohibition against alcohol. But the founders were specifically concerned with “that cursed evil rum.” Beer, thanks to the brewing process, was actually safer to drink than coastal Georgia’s brackish water. The first settlers were deposited on the future site of Savannah with “ten tuns,” or casks, of beer.

While the British brew staved off dysentery and other maladies, it suffered from the long journey overseas and from storage in the Southern heat. When William

Horton, Oglethorpe’s compatriot, was deeded Jekyll Island, he set to work solving the problem, planting barley, rye, and hops and ordering distilling equipment, including a pot of “Great Copper.”

Visitors to Jekyll in 1745 recorded that “after dinner Horton took us out about a mile to see a field of barley which is an uncommon thing in this colony.” By the following year, he possessed “a very Large Barnfull of Barley, not inferior to ye Barley in England.”

Horton’s enterprise was the first recorded brewery in the South. Its exact location is unknown. Popular belief once held that a ruined tabby structure dating to Horton’s era was the brew house, and although archaeological excavations have since suggested otherwise, the structure is still commonly known as “the Brewery.”

Lydia Thompson

Printmaker

Her inspired etchings combine a naturalist’s curiosity with an artist’s eye for beauty

BY CANDICE DYER

If you are motoring around Jekyll, don’t be surprised if you find yourself behind a slow-poke car that moseys along and stops occasionally; please don’t honk your horn and startle the wildlife. That’s just Lydia Thompson, who is doing her omniscient best to notice every flicker of a feather around her.

“I drive really, really slowly around here,” she says. “There might be a wood stork in the marsh, and I might need to stop and snap a photo before it flies away. I am always hungry for inspiration. I am an image junkie.”

Thompson is a renowned printmaker who employs her meticulous, time-consuming art in the service of conservation. Her primary subject is birds. “I’m a traveler, a wanderer, and birds inspire wanderlust,” she says. “Why? Because they fly!”

An avid birder since she was a child growing up, often riding on horseback, in Natchez, Mississippi, she still speaks about these creatures with awe. “Birds lend definition to a place,” she says. “I especially love shorebirds such as the Wilson’s plover.”

Thompson, who has traveled through all fifty states on the trail of various avian subjects, captures their enviable freedom and flight in printmaking, an ancient art that involves etching a subject onto a plate to create a relief, running it through a press, and in her case, hand-coloring the end result.

In the studio behind her house, Lydia Thompson creates prints using a French Tool press, which she calls her “pride and joy.” In this series, she works on an etching of brown pelicans titled Breaking Formation

“Lydia’s work is extremely intricate and distinctly beautiful,” says Susan Wiles, executive director of the Glynn Visual Art Association, which displays some of Thompson’s creations. “Her knowledge of birds is incredible, and her ability to capture them in her art is such an asset to our community.”

It is not easy, Thompson says, to render the wispy, wind-borne tines of a feather in an etching, but she thinks of her work as simple drawing. “I was born to be a printmaker,” she says. “As soon as I met other printmakers, I knew this was what I was meant to do.”

Thompson earned a degree in commercial art from Mississippi State and then worked for a while in advertising in Atlanta. “It wasn’t satisfying,” she says flatly. In 1977, she discovered Jekyll Island, relocating there permanently in 1985. “This is a place of quiet, a place of healing, a place that offers birds both freshwater and saltwater, so there is great variety.”

Those salutary qualities figured into her battle with breast cancer in 2014. “The treatments were brutal,” she recalls, “but my friends would take me to the sanctuary where all of the painted buntings would gather in the birdbath. That was solace, and inspiration.”

Some of the old-school printmaking tools such as nitric acid are toxic, she says, and she currently is employing “green” soybean-based inks in her work. “It’s new for me, but I’m excited to explore with different materials.”

One of the feathers in Thompson’s cap is the Earle R. Greene Memorial Award from the Georgia Ornithological Society. “I am humbled,” she says, “by everything I see around me, and art helps you look outside yourself. It’s amazing what you can see if you really look.”

“Our dogs are water dogs; they love the beach as much as I do. We have to hold them back from running into the ocean. Even our oldest, Darcy, who is twelve, wants to run right into the water. But they also like to dress up; they wear tutus in the Fourth of July parade, and all four of them are going to pull me down the aisle in a wagon when I get married at the Westin next year. They’re part of my family—they really are.” —jennifer vinge

As told to JENNIFER SENATOR • Photograph by GABRIEL HANWAY jennifer vinge, a teacher, has been coming to jekyll since she was a baby and continues to enjoy its dog-friendly beaches with her daughter, taylor, and three newfoundlands, darcy, willow, and rosie. a fourth “newfie,” gunther, will join their pack when she marries her fiance, jeff arent, on jekyll next year. the sudden appearance of bobcats on jekyll could be a game-changer for the local food chain

By TONY REHAGEN