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The Scions of Sea Island
Jan Alexander
03/01/2004
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An Entrepreneur’s Haven
Howard Coffin, who thought golf was a waste of
time but was skilled at cultivating high-profile guests, would most likely
approve of the current developments. A descendent of English Quakers who arrived
in the New World in the 17th century, Coffin was born in 1873 and grew up
modestly in the Quaker colony of West Milton, Ohio. Early on, he showed talent
as an inventor. Working as a mail carrier while attending the University of
Michigan, he built a one-cylinder steam-driven automobile to take on his
mail rounds. Later he invented the Hudson, one of the first of the inexpensive
automobiles geared to the everyman customer. By the end of 1910, the Hudson
Motor Co., which he cofounded, was worth $5 million. This was a time when auto
manufacturers liked to test their latest models in dirt-road races. With his
wife, Matilda, he went to Savannah for the Vanderbilt Cup and Grand Prix, the
most famous of the races. It was his chauffeur there who first took him to see
the swampy, historic chain of islands to the south, which includes Blackbeard,
Sapelo, Wolf and Jekyll islands as well as St. Simons and Sea Island. On a later
trip, Coffin ponied up $150,000 for 20,000 acres of marsh and highland on
Sapelo, that in antebellum days had been famous for its cotton plantations, but
that, by the mid-1920s, boasted of little but ruins and a hunting
preserve.| The legacy of visionary engineer and developer Howard Coffin is still guiding the family business. |
“Mr. Coffin was under the spell of coastal Georgia for the rest of
his life,” says Jones. The Sea Island founder built his first Georgia house on
Sapelo, where he and Matilda invited friends, including Henry Ford, down for
house parties. Coffin cleared some fields for an airstrip, and Charles
Lindbergh, en route to Mexico after his famous Paris flight, landed there. With
all of the entertaining, the couple started thinking about building guest
quarters for visiting friends and simpatico strangers. Even then, Coffin had
some ideas about preserving the land. He sponsored a study that led to Glynn
County being the third in the United States to establish zoning laws. He thought
places should be set aside for deer and game birds, and persuaded the state to
transfer isolated Blackbeard Island to the federal government as a biological
research station. When Coffin decided to build a golf course on Sea Island at
the site of an old plantation—realizing that most of his guests would not share
his disdain for the sport—he insisted that the fairways not disturb the slave
graveyard, and ordered that artifacts such as the bones of an Indian chief and a
rusty Spanish dagger, found by workmen, be preserved. The old plantation corn
and fodder barn forms the nucleus of the clubhouse today.
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