STATELY HOMES, old oak trees and marshes dot the Sea Island landscape.

If leisure time is allowed amidst discussions of politics and the economy, the world leaders might indulge in a round of golf, scuba diving, sailing, horseback riding or even wild turkey hunting. Perhaps some of the 7,000 delegates expected to attend will decide to buy their own beachside “cottages,” as the houses are called by the locals.

Actually, the main force behind bringing the G8 Summit to these sleepy isles was the Sea Island Co., which operates the two most luxurious resorts in the Golden Isles and develops its real estate, albeit at a pace designed not to disturb the islands’ sea turtles and egrets or the moss-hung Old South charm.

The man behind these efforts, Alfred W. (Bill) Jones III, the chairman and CEO of the Sea Island Co., is carrying out a dual legacy of expansion and preservation that he learned from his father, Bill Jones Jr., who learned it from his father, Bill Jones Sr., who learned from his cousin Howard Coffin in the 1920s and 1930s. The two patriarchs continue to speak from the grave. The legacy of careful development and canny marketing left by the visionary developer “Mr. Coffin,” as the present-day CEO reverently calls him, still guides the business, while the first Bill Jones’ conservative financial management strategy informs decisions made today.

The success of this family business is apparent to anyone visiting Glynn County, Ga., where the Sea Island Co. owns 65,000 acres of prime low-country coastal property and, with a staff of approximately 1,800, is the largest private employer. The company’s revenues for the 2002-2003 season were $185 million, according to Standard and Poor’s Register of Companies.

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.

“The Sea Island Co. is the reason we don’t look like Hilton Head,” says Pat Morris, executive director of the Glynn County Historical Society. Anyone who has ever visited the coastal areas of the Deep South can see the perils of over-enthusiastic development—bumper-to-bumper traffic, strip malls and too many tourists.

THE SEA Island resort has long drawn the well-heeled, who take advantage of the bucolic atmosphere.

The Right Crowd
Sea Island has had many visitors in the past, but largely well-heeled hotel guests and vacation-home buyers looking for a quiet retreat. George and Barbara Bush honeymooned there in 1945 and returned for their 50th wedding anniversary. Jimmy Carter has visited (despite the distinctly Republican flavor of the place). Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah wed the photographer Anthony Beauchamp in a hastily arranged ceremony at the home of Bill Jones Sr. and his wife, Kit, in 1949. Eugene O’Neill wrote Ah Wilderness there. Bill Gates has vacationed there, as has John Travolta. Recent golf tournaments such as the Walker Cup and the UBS Cup have brought in the “right kind” of people, says Peggy Cate, a longtime resident of the area whose late husband was the grandson of Glynn County’s most famous historian, Margaret Davis Cate.

Despite its cache, locals betray a certain element of trepidation about the G8 Summit. Residents speak, in that just-between-you-and-me way in which Southerners bring up unpleasant trifles, of concerns over the less-desirables who might accompany the summiteers, although one of the reasons the White House selected the resort is the strict, yet discreet, security. If everything goes according to plan, demonstrators protesting global poverty and environmental degradation, who are now part and parcel of G8 summits, will be no closer than Savannah, 75 miles to the north, along with the international press corps.

Georgia’s Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, whom Jones calls a great cheerleader for bringing the summit to Sea Island, has said he expects the summit to boost the Georgia economy by $300 million to $500 million, or about as much as two Super Bowls. While some dispute those figures, especially given the costs of antiterrorism measures and security to control protestors, the G8 Summit in Kananaskis, Canada, in 2002 did inject about $300 million into the local economy. “There is a precedent. And protestors spend money, too,” says Erin O’Brien Dobson, executive director of the G8 Host Committee in Atlanta, a nonprofit that is trying to raise at least $16 million in private donations to supplement the federal funding.

Left: Bill Jones Sr., Jones III and Jones Jr. in 1982. Right: Bill Jones III is the current CEO.

Jones, a cochairman of the Host Committee’s fund-raising arm, worked hard to get the summit and make it a positive force for the local economy; the economy has prospered with the real-estate price boom on Sea Island and St. Simons but remains beleaguered in Brunswick, the county seat on the mainland, where the poverty rate is around 18 percent. Locals say Jones lobbied the White House aggressively; he admits, “We did a little work behind the scenes.” (George Bush pere’s fondness for the place probably did not hurt.)

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.

In 1926, Coffin, for the grand sum of $349,485.17, bought all five miles of Sea Island, exclusive of some lots that had already been sold, from a group of Brunswick developers who had given up on it. It was his largest single investment to date. As Jones tells the story: “They recognized they were buying this real estate that eventually they were going to develop and sell. They realized they needed a place where people could stay if they were going to look at it.” That was how the idea for a hotel came to be.

By then, Coffin was working with his cousin Bill Jones, who was 30 years his junior, called him Uncle Howard, and had long been kind of a business protégé. The first Bill Jones had been a frail child. His health had mended enough by his college years that he was able to immerse himself in Detroit debutante parties, but in the winter of 1923, when he was 21 and studying business at the Wharton School, he developed tuberculosis. His doctors advised a warm climate, so he boarded a train for Georgia. In This Happy Isle, a book about the company and the dynasty, commissioned and published by the Sea Island Co. in 1978, author Harold H. Martin says that Coffin dreamed big dreams and had his head in the clouds, while Jones functioned as the detail man who paid attention to the costs and potential payoffs of their ventures. Because the first Bill Jones developed cold feet—fortuitously, it turned out—about the original plans to make the hotel an eight-story affair patterned after the famous Breakers in Palm Beach, the company opted for a more modest 46-room Mediterranean-style villa, designed by the famous architect Addison Mizner. The structure, which cost $440,000 to build and furnish in 1927, was meant to be temporary. The first real renovation is going on right now. It will not be completed until 2007, but is taking place in phases so that it will not interfere with the summit or other day-to-day business.

SEA ISLAND'S verdant wetlands await the expected 7,000 delegates who will attend the G8 Summit in June.

Fiscal Conservatives
The loss of the Cloister’s Mobil Five-Star ranking in 1998 was a blow to business (the Lodge, which features a personal butler for each guest, continues to earn five stars). There were some layoffs and a management team shakeup in 1999, according to an account in the local newspaper, the Brunswick News. But Jones learned from his grandfather’s legacy that the company can weather hard times if it keeps a close eye on spending. He says the $200-million renovation can be financed inexpensively in the current low-rate debt market.

DINING AT the Cloister.

The Cloister opened its doors to an eager stream of local socialites and visiting VIPs in October 1928. Coffin had brought in an old crony named Charles F. Redden, once a truck manufacturer in Detroit, who turned out to be a public relations genius. Redden’s simple but highly effective technique was to invite the talkers—prominent media people—and the talked-about to experience the pleasures of Sea Island firsthand. His greatest coup was when he got then-President Calvin Coolidge to spend the 1928 Christmas holiday at the Cloister and pose for a picture planting an oak tree. A giddy 10 months of sun and fun followed. Then the stock market crashed.

Coffin’s investment in aircraft and transportation companies had propped up the Sea Island Co. He was the biggest stockholder in many of these companies, and he went bankrupt with them. By 1930, the Sea Island Co. was $2.5 million in the hole. Coffin sold his Sapelo Island assets to R.J. Reynolds Jr. and also sold the Sea Island game preserve (which the company was recently able to purchase back). Coffin’s beloved Matilda, who had a weak heart, died in 1932, and his second marriage to a young freelance journalist in New York was not a happy one. Martin writes that with these setbacks, and no more money to build, life lost its meaning for Coffin. On the morning of November 21, 1937, Jim Compton, then the general manager, went to visit Coffin at home and found him lying on the floor in a pool of blood, a bullet from a Savage .22-caliber rifle in his head.

"The Sea Island Co. is the reason we don't look like Hilton Head."

“My grandparents considered selling everything and going back to Detroit,” relates Jones. “In the end they stayed and sold things off slowly.” However, Bill Jones Sr. had to take the train once a month to Detroit to talk terms with the bankers who held the notes. “My grandfather became prematurely bald when he was only in his 20s. Some time later the bankers told him if they’d realized how young he was they never would have worked with him.”

The company did not make its first profit until 1941. The first Bill Jones divided the stock in the company among his four children. Since then succession has been determined largely by picking out the child who shows the most inclination to run the business. Bill Jones Jr. retired from day-to-day operations and spends much of his time, when he is not off on hunting trips, at the pecan farm in western Georgia that he owns with his brother and two sisters. All four siblings serve on the Sea Island Board of Directors.

When it came to picking the CEO for the current generation, Bill III was one of three siblings, but the only one with experience or interest in the hotel business. His sister, Ann Gregg, lives on St. Simons with her husband, who is a lawyer and writer. His brother, Jim, is an artist who lives in New York but visits frequently and has made aesthetic contributions to the company, including ornately carved mantels in many of the rooms and a painting of the marshes that hangs in the clubhouse at the Sea Island Golf Club.

Groomed to Govern
Jones wanted to be a hunting guide when he was a teenager. “My father,” he recalls, “sat me down and said what you need to do is find a job that pays you enough that you can hunt because you want to, not because you have to.” When he did express a wish to have a summer job as a lifeguard with the company, his parents vetoed the idea on the grounds that it would be too easy. Instead the young Jones worked roofing, construction and paper-mill assembly line jobs in the area. “My grandfather had my father do the same thing,” he says. After graduating from Valdosta State University in Georgia, he learned the hotel business from the ground up. First he worked at the Cloister in Boca Raton, La., which was the model for the one on Sea Island, then at the Tides Inn in Virginia. “I made beds,” he says. “When I came here I knew how to spray wash the roof and clean grease in the kitchen. You develop empathy for people at every level that way.” He believes the experience was important, also, because it taught him how to spot problems. “You come back to your own place and you’re going to see what people want you to see.”

While he is the only family member actively involved in managing the company, the other Joneses all hold equity. To avoid trapping anyone in the business, they have a program that allows any family shareholder to redeem stock for cash, with no questions asked. “I’m a big believer in the idea that they have the right to do that,” says Jones. “And they are great about recognizing that the business has investment needs, so that they don’t break the company with redemption requests. I think this company is the glue that holds the family together in a very positive way.”

There are no family meetings outside of the annual shareholder’s meeting, but family members hunt, fish and socialize together frequently, and sometimes children and nieces and nephews join Bill Jr. and his three siblings at their monthly meetings at the pecan farm.

Jones and his wife, Sally, a former flight attendant, have seven dogs but no children. He says he has no reason to think about retiring from “the best job in the world” and his nieces and nephews are all under 18; in short, the idea of a successor seems highly premature. He is more concerned with the long-term future of the land. He has been able to buy property at reasonable prices, which means there is little pressure to build to make up the costs. “This way we can have a much lower-density development than probably anyone else could justify.” It is just as well—too many world leaders buying in the area would probably make for squabbling neighbors anyway.