Just the Prescription

"Prescribed fires are like going to the doctor," says Ken Parker, a wildland fire specialist with the Georgia Forestry Commission. "To get well, you might be prescribed a course of medicine. A burn plan is like a prescription for the forest."

Fire is essential to the health of forests, particularly those in the Southeast. The ancient method of fire-starting—by lightning strike—maintains the balance of forest growth. Naturally occurring fires spread over millions of acres each year, reducing undergrowth and clearing space for grasslands. In the modern world, though, fires are extinguished quickly by firefighters and contained by human development, with roads and other construction acting as firebreaks. It disturbs the forest's natural cycle.

"Prescribed fire is just man mimicking what Nature does naturally," says Parker, who has more than a quarter-century of experience with the practice, including 22 years in timberland management and five years running the wildland fire certification program for the state forestry commission.

The three major goals of prescribed fires are to:

1) Improve public safety by reducing fuel that can build up in a forest

2) Enhance natural habitats for native plants and wildlife, and

3) Manage timberland.

Most prescribed burns address a combination of these factors. On Jekyll, the key objectives are public safety and ecological conservation.

Georgia’s Burn Masters

“Saying you can’t see the forest for the trees is a good adage,” says Ken Parker, wildland fire specialist for the Georgia Forestry Commission. “If the forest is too overgrown, the trees can’t flourish. If there are too many trees, the forest is not healthy.”

In Georgia, a leader in using the technique to manage forests, an average of 1.3 million acres of land are consumed by prescribed fires each year, Parker says. In 2020, because of heavy rainfall, the total is likely to be under 1 million acres.

The Circle Of Wildlife

"Fire is needed in Southeastern forests like rain is needed for the rainforest," says Joseph Colbert, wildlife biologist with the Jekyll Island Authority.

When fire consumes the tangles of undergrowth in a forest, new plants can grow, providing nourishment for animals and pollinators. Fire creates clearings with more sunlight and grassland for grazing animals. Fire can clear trees around wetlands, offering access to water for creatures such as salamanders. Without the natural pattern of fire moving through forested areas, habitats suffer.

Prescribed fire on Jekyll enhances conditions for a range of species. One of the goals is restoring grassy areas, which include meadows of distinctive rose-tinted muhly grass, or sweetgrass. "[It's] the habitat for so many species," says Colbert, who wrote his master's thesis on prescribed fire in maritime grasslands. "It is essential and has ecological benefits."

To become certified as a Georgia prescribed fire specialist, a person needs:

• Two years of experience in prescribed fires

• Five fires under your belt as a “burn boss”

• Completion of a two-day course

• A passing grade on an exam

—Rebecca Burns

Fewer Fuels for Fire

Regular fires reduce dropped pine needles, fallen leaves, and overgrown brush on the forest floor. This buildup, also called “duff,” can serve as an accelerant for a fire. Prescriptive burning reduces duff and thus lessens the chance of a fire burning uncontrollably.

"Most prescribed fires are on one-, three- or five-year rotations, but in areas of Jekyll, fire has been suppressed for 50 or 60 years," says Yank Moore, JIA's conservation land manager. "The fuel loads have built up." In most wooded areas, duff is a few inches deep. But in the northern end of Jekyll, it has reached levels several feet high, Moore says.

Duff not only provides fuel for potential wildfires, it suppresses plants essential for wildlife. Just as a layer of pine straw prevents weed growth in a suburban yard, accumulation of pine needles in a forested area prevents growth of the grass and plants animals need.

Reducing that build-up will take a long and carefully outlined plan of prescriptive burns, Moore explains. Duff will be burned off a few inches at a time, and only under ideal weather conditions. It could take years to reduce fuel loads to a healthy level. But the payoff will be significant.

"We are not burning to burn," Moore says. "The goals are to improve diversity of both the wildlife and plant communities on the island."

Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke

"Before a match is dropped, a lot of planning goes into prescribed fires," says Parker, the wildland fire expert.

Weather, wind, and how wet (or dry) the area is all are considered. Burners also consider the specific plants or trees in an area. In coastal regions such as Jekyll, waxy plants such as saw palmettos create a unique challenge because, while they can be slower to ignite, they can burn with great intensity.

When planning a fire, as much attention is paid to smoke as flames. Some of the factors affecting smoke include the moistness of the fuel, wind conditions, the height the fire might rise, and the potential for fog. Particulate matter in smoke bonds to the water in fog and increases visibility problems. All of these factors are included in the dispersion index, which indicates how well and how quickly smoke might clear. "There is a lot of science that goes into planning a burn," Parker comments.

For Moore, Colbert and the rest of the Jekyll team charged with implementing the island's fire prescription, a key ingredient is patience; waiting for ideal weather conditions. Fire can't be started too soon after rainfall. And it can't be started in too-dry conditions, for risk of rapid spreading. It can't be started when the air is still and smoke will accumulate. And it can't be set when wind gusts could spread flames.

Colbert stresses that visitors to the island who might be there on the day of a planned fire should understand what's happening. "One day of prescribed fire on a day with ideal conditions for a burn with a little bit of smoke is way better than three or four weeks of smoke and burning when lightning strikes," he says.

By Jewel Wicker

rom her home in College Park, Georgia, south of Atlanta, LaVances Givens rattles off fond memories of Jekyll Island during the summer of 1959. Fresh out of her first year at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University, following its 1988 merger with Atlanta University), the Savannah native spent the summer as a cashier in the dining room of the new Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel. She stayed there with several other student workers, most of whom were from Macon. Among the crowd, she met a head waiter who would become her husband.

The Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel was situated on St. Andrews beach, the only spot in segregated Georgia where Black people were allowed to come in contact with the ocean. It was a vacation hub for Black families and a hangout for locals, who often held picnics and reunions there. "People just came by the droves," Givens recalls. "You couldn't even see the sand."

St. Andrews became more than a simple summer hangout, though. It also served as a regular stopover on the Chitlin' Circuit, the informal name given to a series of venues, many in the South, where African-American musicians and entertainers performed to black crowds during the Jim Crow era. Local historians say blues great B.B. King and Georgia-born Otis Redding were among the national acts to perform at St. Andrews beach on the circuit.

Few outside of the area know the history of the historic beach and facilities that dotted the section of the coastline on the southern side of Jekyll Island. That's due, in part, to the relatively short-lived heyday that the place enjoyed. It might also be attributed to the fact that many of the more traditional news outlets of the time—the white-owned and white-run press—didn't take an interest in what happened there.

When it opened to the public in August 1959, the Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel became the only hotel where Black visitors could stay, sitting steps away from the only beach on Jekyll Island where Black patrons were allowed. A couple months before its unveiling, on June 28, 1959 the Atlanta Daily World—the first successful African-American newspaper in the United States—ran an advertisement for the new inn. The ad boasted a hotel of "50 luxurious rooms and suites" with wall-to-wall carpeting, air conditioning, televisions, and telephones in the rooms. A month later, the World noted the significance of the establishment's location: It sat near the spot where the slave ship Wanderer, in 1858, became the last vessel to bring enslaved Africans to Georgia.

The dining room at the hotel, Givens recalls, could hold about 50 patrons. It featured a slot machine that took dimes. "It might have been illegal," she says now, laughing.

But the biggest draw of the complex may have been the Dolphin Club Lounge. Tyler Bagwell, a speech communications professor at the College of Coastal Georgia in Brunswick, has written two books and released two documentaries on the history of Jekyll Island. In an article on segregation on the island, Bagwell described the lounge as a "dance floor with a horseshoe-shaped bar and a small stage in one corner of the room."

In the early days of the Dolphin Club, Givens remembers Atlanta jazz organist Cleveland Lyons regularly playing at the lounge on weekends. Before long, national artists stopped by, too.

White performers who came to Jekyll Island often played at whites-only places, including an auditorium in the Historic District and the grand Aquarama, a combination convention center/entertainment complex with meeting rooms and an Olympic-sized heated swimming pool. After the Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel opened, Black performers and the patrons looking to see them had the Dolphin Club Lounge. But that soon changed.

Dr. J. Clinton Wilkes's request to host a large gathering of Black dental professionals in 1960 resulted in the construction of an auditorium to be built near the Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel, to satisfy the legally dubious "separate but equal" doctrine that grew out of the adoption of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution almost a century earlier.

The Jekyll Island Authority quickly constructed a simple building, christened the St. Andrews Auditorium. Through the early '60s, the auditorium was used for family reunions, dances, and the occasional concert.

With the beach pavilion that had opened there in 1955 — complete with dressing rooms, a concession stand, and a covered picnic area — the Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel, the Dolphin Club Lounge, and the new auditorium at St. Andrews beach, the area quickly became a resort area for Black families throughout the state and beyond.

Jekyll Island—mainly the Dolphin Club Lounge and the St. Andrews Auditorium (as bareboned as it was)—also grew into a stopover on the Chitlin' Circuit. In an interview conducted by the Jekyll Island Authority in 2013, the late historian Jim Bacote remembers "top entertainment of the era" playing the auditorium, which he described as "basically a tin building, and with no air conditioning."

Andrea Marroquin, Curator for the Jekyll Island Authority, said the museum has been able to confirm that, along with Redding and King, Millie Jackson, Percy Sledge, and Irma Thomas performed at St. Andrews beach.

According to Bagwell, concert promoter Charlie Cross brought Jackson, Sledge, Clarence Carter, Tyrone Davis, and Li'l Willie Johnson to the Dolphin Club Lounge. Both the Jekyll Island Authority and Bagwell said Redding was the last big act to perform in St. Andrews Auditorium, in 1964.

As it turned out, the Circuit didn't last. Jim Crow laws were struck down by the mid '60s, most notably through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the ensuing years, the island integrated and most of the venues closed.

Today, Givens has lost touch with many of the people she remembers from her time at the Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel. Several have died. But she hopes those memories of St. Andrews beach are not lost to future generations.

"It’s a part of the history of the island," she says.

From 1950 to 1964, St. Andrews beach served as the only section of Jekyll Island that allowed Black visitors. In an interview with the Jekyll Island Authority in 2013, historian Jim Bacote recalls a demonstration in 1963 in which he and several others attempted to enter a bath house in an attempt to desegregate the island.

Following Bacote’s death in 2018, the College of Coastal Georgia's Tyler Bagwell told the Coastal Courier that others were denied access to a nearby golf course, the Aquarama's indoor swimming pool, Peppermint Land Amusement Park, and some motels. "A lawsuit was filed,” he said. "In June 1964 it was ruled that the state-operated facilities at Jekyll Island would be integrated."

Bacote said the integration led to many of the Black-only establishments closing. "[W]ith us being able to go to the Aquarama," he said, "we didn’t want to go down [to St. Andrews] anymore."

—Jewel Wicker