Charlton County’s Chesser Island

Joe Chesser killed this buck in his backyard on Chesser Island in 1960. He recently had the deer scored, and it’s No. 4 for Charlton County.

It lies, does the old homestead, on an island of its own. A century old now but even at that little changed, it is surrounded by the vastness of the Okefenokee Swamp. The alligators know the place well, as do the bears, the hogs, the deer. But not as well as Joe Chesser. Looking back at his life on Chesser Island, the 88-year-old says, “It was a boy’s paradise.”

As we ramble and weave through the shadows of his boyhood, memory after memory rolling back, nostalgia alters his voice. I know, as I’ve hunted this Swamp from one side to the other for more than 35 years now, and a large portion of it is ingrained into my very soul. I can only imagine what things were like when Chesser Island was the only world one knew.

But we’re about to get into that. This story, for me, started with a deer that Joe Chesser killed 64 years ago. It turned out to be not just any deer, but one of the best to ever come out of Charlton County. There was this huge oak tree, see, just off the back porch of the house, and Joe had a stand thrown together amongst its branches…

Save that story for later. Possibly the best part of all this is that you can see things for yourself today—just as it was back in 1924, when the home that Joe Chesser grew up in was built.

Chesser Island, all 592 acres of it, is now managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The park entrance is some dozen miles out of Folkston, the homestead itself roughly 15.

Getting there, you’ll traverse spots where huge heart pines were inlaid to provide bridges of sorts. As a boy, Joe Chesser walked out a mile and a half over some of them each day to meet the school bus…

The saga opens in 1858, when W. T. Chesser brought his family into the middle of nowhere and settled the island. They were here to stay. Joe’s dad, Tom, was born in 1896, grew up to marry a distant cousin, Iva Lee Chesser, and they raised seven children.

“It truly was a boy’s paradise,” Joe Chesser continued, “but it was no place at all for my sisters to grow up in. For instance, Daddy and Mama grew up 4 miles apart, and even that was a long way back when you either walked or rode a mule to get where you were going. In fact, Daddy later traded a Model T Ford for a pair of mules because mules could go into the Swamp where an automobile could never hope to go.”

Beginning a life together, the initial need for Tom and Iva Chesser was a home of their own. What did that entail 100 years ago, virtually alone within the wilds of the Okefenokee? There weren’t, after all, big-box builder supply stores on every corner of town ready to deliver upon request.

“Daddy selected and cut heart pine from the island, then planed it at a sawmill that was also on the island,” Joe says. “He hired a carpenter for $2 a day, and in 1924, it took 24 days to build the house. There has never been insulation, running water or electricity here. Daddy came up one day with a claw-foot bathtub and put it on the back porch where the sun would hit it and warm the water. Our well was dug out back, and the tub was just at the end of our hand-pump. We would pump the tub full, try to wait for the water to warm, then take a bath.

“All this water here has a high sulfur content. We drank it and cooked with it and bathed in it, but I never had a girlfriend until I moved away because I always smelled like sulfur!”

Also by the back porch is the woodpile. That’s where Joe lost his class ring in 1953. He discovered that fact when it was found and returned to him—49 years later, in 2002!

The house contains five bedrooms, a kitchen and the “front room” that every home in 1924 had for entertaining. Although there was very little of that on Chesser Island. Today, all is exactly as it was then, even a few family clothes still hanging in open closets. The huge logs cut for foundation corners remain level. There were four outbuildings, chief among them being the syrup shed. Corn crib, smokehouse, storage shed… and split-rail fence surrounding and dividing it all.

Chesser Island, all 592 acres of it, is now managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The park entrance is some dozen miles out of Folkston, the homestead itself is roughly 15 miles. When you visit, you can see the very home that Joe Chesser grew up in, complete with some clothes still hanging in the closets.

Chesser Island, all 592 acres of it, is now managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The park entrance is some dozen miles out of Folkston, the homestead itself is roughly 15 miles. When you visit, you can see the very home that Joe Chesser grew up in, complete with some clothes still hanging in the closets.

This, remember, in 1924. Hand saws, not chain saws. Mules instead of log trucks. Toil. Ingenuity. Tom and Iva Chesser and their children transforming the bounty offered by the Okefenokee into building their own lives their own way. Every room is full of memories for Joe. Even the tiny cracks between the floorboards.

“That wasn’t poor workmanship by the carpenter,” he relates. “That was so Mama could sweep Okefenokee sand out through them. She made everything that was made for all of us. We had two kinds of bedding, for instance. We would gather moss from the Swamp and she would boil it to kill the redbugs, then top it with duck feathers inside the ticking to make a mattress.”

A mental snapshot of a 100-year-old homestead is one thing; but when Joe Chesser began speaking of those ducks and other wildlife in Tom’s day, fascination took a firm grip. And the 1928-29 hunting license? Well…

Here’s what Georgia’s seasons and bag limits looked like for the 1928-29 hunting season. Could you imagine killing 25 ducks in one day? Joe Chesser said the Swamp was full of mallards back then.

“One of the main food sources in Daddy’s day was venison,” Joe says. “There were deer everywhere on this island. Then, when he was about 17, he started seeing buzzards circling all over. Some kind of disease got into the herd and killed every one of them off. If we saw a deer back in the days when I was riding the school bus, that was something to talk about for two weeks. They’ve come back now, though, and come back hard.”

One thing that hasn’t come back is the ducks.

“Back in my dad’s day, he said the sky would just be black with ducks. There were mallards everywhere; this Swamp was absolutely packed with them. Mostly what you see now are wood ducks.”

Chesser has a treasure trove of items saved from over the years, none more interesting to me than a hunting license issued to 31-year-old, 5-foot, 8-inch, 150-lb. J.T. Chesser, known as Tom, in the year 1928. The slip of paper shows its age, but it is perfectly legible. On the back are printed Georgia hunting seasons and bag limits. Seasons include: quail, doves, wild turkey, summer or wood duck, migratory duck, woodcock, plovers, snipe, marsh hens, cat squirrels, foxes, deer and possums. Wild pheasants, grouse and fox squirrels were protected until Nov. 30, 1930. Rabbits were unprotected, but a license was necessary for hunting them.

Bag limits? Brace yourself.

Quail, 20 in one day; doves, 25; migratory ducks, 50; summer or wood duck, marsh hens, snipe and all other birds not here listed, 25; cat squirrels, 15; wild turkey, two in one season; deer, two male in one season. And this note: “Every person killing a deer must report the fact in writing to County Game Warden within five days. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor.”

It was a time of subsistence living, and there were nine mouths to feed in Tom Chesser’s household. Slob hunting was never a part of the picture. In fact, in later years, Tom Chesser took a job as one of those County Game Wardens.

“In my lifetime there was always plenty of game on Chesser Island,” Joe recalls. “Daddy ran a long trapline that took two days to check, and he would spend the night out alone somewhere on the island skinning and salting pelts. Those pelts were one of my family’s main sources of income. There was a Mr. Lee from Waycross who would come to Folkston twice during the winter and buy the hides.

“I remember back when there was a craze for the coonskin caps like Daniel Boone wore, and coon hides were selling for $7 apiece. You could get $7.50 for a big boar coon, and that 50 cents made a difference. We had two big persimmon trees out in the front yard, and one night there were 11 coons in them. I killed nine before I ran out of bullets.”

Those seven hides would have paid the carpenter…

“We also made and sold our own brand of cane syrup, and folks loved it because of the flavor that Okefenokee water produced. Daddy even sold crossties to the railroad, cutting them out of pine and shaping them with a broadaxe. We raised our own hogs, and 40 yards from the front porch on the other side of the split-rail fence, we would take slop out to them and feed them over the fence. On two occasions a bear came and killed a hog right there by the fence.”

And there were other encounters, especially on the way to school. And one spot in particular. We were standing on it as Joe told the story, pointing here and there.

“This was a spot where Daddy put down walking logs so that we wouldn’t have to wade swamp water on the way to meet the school bus. It came as far into us as it could, and then we would walk out to it. There was only one place up here that had been cleared wide enough for it to turn around in. I was right here walking home one afternoon when I heard something heavy coming though the bushes. The first thing that popped out was a big old boar hog, and the second was a bear following it. I didn’t have a pair of shoes until I was in the fourth grade, but I knew how to use my feet. I don’t know if either of them came to the house, but I know who got there first!”

Should you happen to visit Chesser Island and walk (only!) the trail to the homestead, you may or may not notice a slight landscape change on the way in. I’m accustomed to the flatness of the Swamp, and it caught my eye, prompting me to ask Joe what was special about the rise.

“There are four Indian mounds on Chesser Island, three on the property (61 acres) we owned,” Joe related. “Two have been dug into, and in one was found a square sheet of rolled-out copper used for arrow and spear points. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Smithsonian now. Bones were found in two of them, and 13 skeletons in the one right in front of the house.”

That happened to be the one I asked about, and the house was but a few yards away. The mounds are now as they were when first erected, not marked as such, simply part of the history of this bewitching place. It’s highly likely that you would walk past and not even know of their existence.

Let us circle back to that whitetail buck. It has a story all its own.

Until a tornado blew it down just a few years ago, there was a huge live oak tree in the backyard of the Chesser homestead. One can still see the stump, between the porch and syrup shed…

“In 1960, I had a stand which was nothing but a couple of boards nailed onto limbs in that tree,” Joe says. “Acorns were falling heavy, and that deer just walked right in. I shot him and he fell into a wire fence that we had. I couldn’t move him by myself, so I drove to Folkston to get some help. I dressed him out, we ate him, and I put the horns on a piece of plywood.”

Just another day on Chesser Island. End of story. For 61 years.

“My son Joseph wanted that deer mounted, so he dropped it off at a taxidermist’s shop in January of 2021.”

Sadly, Joseph passed away after contracting COVID, and the buck was again forgotten.

In January 2024, Joe’s grandson, Andrew, entered a buck in the Truck-Buck contest that ended up scoring 130 2/8 inches, No. 3 in the Charlton County books. He took the buck to be mounted. To the same taxidermist…

“The taxidermist happened to mention that he was about through mounting my deer, and that it was a good one for Charlton County and needed to be scored,” Joe recalls. “Turns out it’s No. 4, right behind Andrew’s, at 122. They were killed about 2 miles apart. The No. 2 deer (Greg Boatright, 149 2/8 inches, 2016) was taken 4 miles away, so they’re all right there together.”

Right there together aptly describes Joe Chesser and the island that bears his family name. He was away for a while—on hiatus from that sulfur water—but the Okefenokee called him home.

“Walking to and from that school bus gave me time to figure out that education was what was going to get me away from Chesser Island, so I made my way to the University of Georgia, graduating in 1959 in one of the largest forestry classes ever. Another guy you wrote about, Skip Skipper from Darien, was in my graduating class. I went to work with St. Regis Paper Company in wood procurement, purchasing wood from owners and getting loggers to cut it. I lived on the Trout River, in Jacksonville, for a while but came back to Folkston in 1970.”

The mists of Chesser Island, in the quiet places, still swirl with untold recollections of the family who built a vibrant, wondrous heritage—continuing in Joe Chesser—upon its trembling earth.

The Suwannee Canal Recreation Area, 11 miles southwest of Folkston, opens the door to today’s public side of Chesser Island. There are guided boat trips into the so-called “prairies” of the Swamp, as well as boat, canoe and kayak rentals. Fishing supplies are also available, with a small cafe on site. On the island itself is a 50-foot observation tower, with access gained via a boardwalk hike over the water. Trust me; you don’t care to get there any other way. The Okefenokee wasn’t exactly created for walking.

As we stood at the rec area and watched a tour boat begin its path through a narrow, tree-choked lane so characteristic of my beloved Swamp, Joe again thought back to his childhood.

“I remember back in my day, even then this was about the only access point. There were times when a hundred boats would be lined up here, headed out to fish, one after another down that little trail until they could spread out into the Swamp.”

That would have been a sight to see, I told myself. Then, looking down that slough, a wry smile presented itself. Because the Okefenokee isn’t changing for anybody.

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