A Short History of Skidaway Island Now Available for Digital Download

A Short History of Skidaway Island, a long out of print book by V.E. “Tex” Kelly, is now available online. Visit Skidaway Audubon.org and scroll down on the homepage and download to your favorite E-reader or click here. You also can click here to view a PDF version of the book.

Digitized by the University of Georgia Scholarly Press, under the sponsorship of Dr. Mark Risse, Director of UGA Marex, the new edition is a Skidaway Audubon Sustainable Skidaway project. Landings Landlovers awarded a grant for the project to support making this important work widely available to residents and scholars.

Kelly wrote the original in 1980 when there were approximately 500 families living in The Landings. Published under the auspices of the Branigar Organization, the community's developer, the book spans archaeological and geological history and provides evidence of humans on the island, through pottery fragments back to 2200 BCE, which are pictured. The Colonial Period includes maps of land holdings through the Revolutionary Period, the early 19th century, the Civil War, the Benedictines on Skidaway, and into the modern era. In his two subsequent editions, the history of The Landings was updated into the 21st century.

Education is among the focus areas of the Sustainable Skidaway project which currently is working to obtain recertification of The Landings as a Certified Sustainable Community by Audubon International.