#152: The Oatland Island Wildlife Center

"The majority of us are neither famous nor powerful. We are just people who muddle through, feeling helpless at times, as do the people in my novels, carried along by the rush of historical events around us."

—Eugenia Price (St. Simons Memoir)

The Oatland Island Wildlife Center

In 1927, the Order of Railway Conductors (ORC) purchased property east of Savannah on Oatland Island. The labor union formed soon after the Civil War ended, and the plan was to develop a desirable home for some of its members to retire. The ORC constructed and opened a magnificent building with room to house sixty-six residents. However, the Conductors Union retirement home didn't catch on with enough union members and eventually closed in 1940.

The extensive ORC building and grounds subsequently passed through various hands, once serving as a syphilis research hospital for women and children and later providing other public health care services to address the need for infectious disease control after World War II.

For the past two decades, the Savannah-Chatham County School System has used the property to house classrooms and other facilities associated with the Oatland Island Wildlife Center, which is open to the public and welcomes tens of thousands of visitors each year.

The Oatland Island Wildlife Center serves as Savannah's unique version of a zoo. The Island setting has delightful nature trails and is a fun place to explore for kids of all ages. Animals, birds, and other creatures residing at the wildlife center include alligators, bison, eagles, owls, bobcats, vultures, chickens, hogs, wolves, cows, red foxes, rabbits, hawks, deer, opossums, toads, salamanders, turtles, and lots and lots of snakes.

From its earliest days, Oatland Island was part of a large cotton plantation owned by the McQueen family, who lived nearby in Thunderbolt. If you enjoy fact-based historical fiction, or love clean-cut romance novels, allow me to introduce you to Eugenia Price. Born in West Virginia and educated in the North — making her a damn Yankee in these parts of the world — Ms. Price became a famous 'southern' writer who sold tens of millions of books in her lifetime, some of them based in Savannah.

It is self-affirmed that Eugenia Price passed through two significant conversions throughout her lifetime. First, she became a Christian in 1949 and spent many years writing popular self-help books to persuade, assist, and guide her readers into the Christian life. Her second conversion happened in 1961 on a visit to St. Simons Island, Georgia.

While on a book signing tour, curiosity took hold, and she began an in-depth research project on the descendants of a local minister she'd come across. By 1965, Eugenia Price had published the first book in a trilogy about the Reverend Anson Greene Phelps Dodge, Jr. and his ancestors. The publishing success led to another trilogy about a real-life character named Don Juan McQueen — the man who once owned the cotton plantation on Oatland Island where the Wildlife Center near Savannah now sits.

John McQueen (1851-1807) was a prominent landowner and speculator in Savannah. He honorably served his new country in the Revolutionary War and was well known to the Marquis de Lafayette because George Washington trusted McQueen to carry his wartime dispatches. While in France, McQueen dined with Thomas Jefferson several times. Financial difficulties forced him to avoid debt collectors by leaving his home near Savannah and moving to Florida. He then swore allegiance to the King of Spain, converted to Catholicism, and took on his new name: Don Juan McQueen.

My favorite novel by Eugenia Price is Savannah (1983), the first in a four-novel series that begins with Don Juan McQueen's daughter: Eliza McQueen Mackay. I'll not ruin the storyline, but Price offers the reader a delightful glimpse of what daily life was like in Savannah around the War of 1812.