Twentieth-century luminaries, including President Coolidge, the Churchills, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and Eugene O'Neill, visited Sea Island in its early days.

“People ask how long it took to get the Sea Island summit, and I say it took us 75 years. Everything we’ve done in the past has led to this,” says Bill Jones III, 46. Blue-eyed and perpetually tan, Jones, like his forebears in the Sea Island Co. dynasty, is a devotee of cigars and big game hunting. The hide of a lion he shot on an African safari sprawls beneath his desk.

Jones is also attuned to his role as a steward of the land. From the start, the family has backed legislation to preserve the area’s many historical sites, prohibit billboards along the marshes, and limit building heights so that nothing protrudes beyond the tree canopy. In recent years the company has become an avid supporter of the nonprofit St. Simons Land Trust, dedicated to protecting the coastline, wetlands and forests of St. Simons. Guests at the Sea Island resorts, the Mediterranean-style 209-room Cloister and the newer 42-room Lodge, patterned after an English country manor house, receive a card upon checking in explaining that unless they request otherwise, $2 will be added to their bill as a donation to the land trust. Since the practice began in November 2001, Jones says, the resorts have taken in more than $300,000 for the land trust.