Cherokee Cottage
Built around 1915 as the Shrady-James Cottage and soon nicknamed Cherokee Cottage, this twenty-room winter home stood in the gilded enclave of the Jekyll Island Club, where Gilded Age railroad and banking families wintered along the Georgia coast. It belonged to the family of Edwin Gould, whose mother-in-law, Mrs. Hester Shrady, lived here; her grandson, young Edwin Gould Jr., loved to visit and bring her armfuls of fragrant Cherokee roses. In 1917 the boy was killed in a hunting accident nearby, his shotgun discharging as he clubbed a trapped raccoon, and his grief-stricken family abandoned their Jekyll homes. Visitors and staff say that around dusk, the hour he died, the sweet scent of Cherokee roses drifts through the air near the cottage though no such roses bloom there. The fragrance is taken as the lingering devotion of a grandson who never stopped bringing flowers to his grandmother's door.
📍 Old Plantation Road, Jekyll Island Club Historic District, Jekyll Island, GA 31527, Jekyll Island, GA · Get directions