St. Simons says …

Many Georgians have long suspected that St. Simons Island packs more interesting history and colorful characters per square, sandy inch than almost any other place in the Deep South.

Now there’s written proof of it.

“Island Time: An Illustrated History of St. Simons Island, Georgia” is a deeply researched, lushly photographed new book that tells the beginnings-to-present-day story of the small island south of Savannah that was first occupied by Paleo-Indians nearly 5,000 years ago. It’s since played host to everyone from Spanish missionaries and “sea island” cotton barons to Nazi submariners who ominously lurked off its shores during World War II.

And yet, unlike its snootier sidekick Sea Island, the 12-mile-long-by-3 mile-wide St. Simons has never been accused of getting too big for its britches.

“The island is much more upscale than when I was a child, but there still seems to be room there for people who don’t have a lot of money,” said Jingle Davis, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who teamed up with photographer (and fellow St. Simons native) Benjamin Galland to produce the book for the University of Georgia Press. “It’s still a place with sandy-floored beach cottages.”

Davis’ parents moved to the island in the 1930s, and she grew up there at a time when the non-summer population numbered about 1,500. If she missed the school bus coming back from mainland Brunswick after class (there’s still no public middle or high school on St. Simons), “My parents would make me hitchhike back,” recalled Davis, who now lives in Athens. “There were no strangers on the island.”

Similarly, Davis and Galland, who’ll appear together at the Decatur Library on Monday night, must not have stumbled across anything surprising while working on “Island Time,” right?

Wrong.

“I thought very confidently I knew a lot about the island’s history,” said Davis, who was fascinated to learn that some scholars believe that Native American women on St. Simons may have made the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, “but anecdotes are clearly different from real research.”

And luckily, some things about the island just are. The final chapter is devoted to the stories handed down from one generation to another. Some, like the Gullah Geechee's tales of "Brother (aka Br'er) Rabbit," eventually found their way into popular mainstream fiction. Many, like the one about the long-dead lighthouse keeper who refuses to, uh, stay dead, feature colorful ghosts that probably wouldn't seem so believable anywhere but the little island.

“It’s just always been that kind of place,” Davis concluded fondly. “Where characters wash up on the beach, and everyone kind of accepts them.”