Jekyll Island, Georgia, is best known today for its beauty and beaches. It is also the former site of the Jekyll Island Club, an organization founded by New York’s elite — the Goulds and Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Pulitzers — who purchased the island in 1886 as a refuge from the harsh New York winters. It became a place to recuperate from lives spent in the world of commerce and finance.

Less well known is the story of Jekyll Island before it fell under the auspices of the Jekyll Island Club. In an effort to fill this gap in the island’s history, June Hall McCash, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University and author of two other books on Jekyll Island, has written Jekyll Island’s Early Years: From Prehistory Through Reconstruction.

McCash gives us page after page crammed full of history: the relations between the Native Americans, the Timucans and the Guale, and the Spanish who sent out Franciscan missionaries among them; the subsequent occupation by England of that part of the Georgian coastline; and the influence of Gen. James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony, and William Horton, the first English resident of the island. There are pages spent on the conflicts between England and Spain over the area, the growth of population on the island, its role in the Revolution, the growth of cotton on the island, and the maneuvers and fighting around Jekyll Island during the Civil War. McCash also gives us a good deal of the history of the du Bignon family, who by 1800 essentially owned Jekyll Island.

For readers of McCash’s other books, or for those familiar with the twentieth century history of Jekyll Island, the “Aftermath” chapter of this book should prove particularly invaluable as a link between this early history of the island and the years following the Civil War. Here we see the du Bignon family as they returned to the devastation left by the war on their beloved island, the overgrown fields, the emptied and ruined houses.

McCash also gives us an in-depth look at the fight by some members of the family to hold fast to their land, a losing battle that finally ended in the purchase of the island by the Jekyll Island Club.

Published by the University of Georgia Press, Jekyll Island’s Early Years contains nearly 40 pages of endnotes and a lengthy bibliography. Nevertheless, it is a popular history, written, as most history should be written, not only for the pleasure and illumination of academics, but for a wide general audience as well.

•••

Jim Minick, who is perhaps a distant cousin of this reviewer and who teaches writing and literature at Radford University in Virginia, has recently seen more than 60 of his short essays collected and published by the West Virginia University Press. In Finding A Clear Path, Minick conducts a meandering tour of the Southwest Virginia countryside, showing us the gardens and farms, forests and fields, of this part of Appalachia. Minick and his wife, Sarah, live on one of these farms, caring for the old house, growing a large garden, and hiking the surrounding hills.

Though Minick looks at nature with the eye of a poet, his writing usually takes a practical bent, offering a valuable, though eccentric, guide to land usage and enjoyment. For instance, he tells us about splitting wood: “Usually I work with easier woods, like birch and oak, or one of the easiest, maple. I set the rounds on end and heave the eight-pound maul over my head. Then I swing the tool with all my might into the block of wood. As a teen, it took me a year or so to master the hardest part, hitting the mark, making a straight cut across the round instead of having the maul hit randomly.”

In keeping with this practical turn to his essays on nature and farming, Minick supplies an appendix to Finding A Clear Path that should prove invaluable to all who share his love of the outdoors. There are 11 pages of lists containing the publications, phone numbers, and Web site addresses of organizations promoting everything from growing ginseng to buying Christmas trees, from gathering mushrooms and pawpaws to hiking at night.

Finding A Clear Path offers enough variety of other topics — hunting deer, bird watching, keeping pests out of a garden (I was particularly interested in the essay on groundhogs, as my neighbors and I now have several living under our houses), and eating organic foods. Whether you live in the city or the country, there are many topics in Finding A Clear Path to delight and amuse you.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)