MY VISIT TO SAPELO ISLAND (Part III)…
In 1865, when the Civil War ended, Thomas Spalding’s tabby mansion at the south end of Sapelo Island lay in ruins. Spalding had passed on some years earlier, in 1851, and was interred with his wife at Ashantilly near Darien. But through the war and the following period of Reconstruction, Spalding’s descendants had been unable to continue his success. By 1912 Thomas Spalding’s entire island kingdom had fallen into ruin.
Enter Howard Coffin, Chief Engineer and a founder of the Hudson Motor Car Co. of Detroit: down from Savannah on a hunting trip, he fell in love with the island and its past history. Coffin consolidated the scattered ownership and bought the entire island – except for the black communities – for $150,000. He rebuilt and glorified Spalding’s mansion into one of the most palatial homes on the east coast. Much that I looked at during my tour of the island was the product of Coffin’s 22 year ownership of the island, including the grass airstrip used by a visiting Charles A. Lindbergh. Presidents Herbert Hoover (1928) and Calvin Coolidge (1932) were among the many celebrities to visit Howard Coffin and his wife, Teddie, and marvel over the man’s industry: the clamshell-surfaced roads; the newly drilled artesian wells; an oyster cannery; drainage of swamplands into once-again productive agricultural land; and Coffin’s extensive pine forest plantings that fostered the Georgia paper-pulp industry.
Not satisfied with his accomplishments on Sapelo, Howard Coffin expanded onto a second barrier island, St. Simons with its adjoining Sea Island, where he built The Cloister – a monumental and opulent structure still in full use today. Tragically, financial pressure from the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing depression forced the sale of his entire Sapelo Island holdings in 1934 to R. J. Reynolds, Jr., an heir to the Reynolds Tobacco fortune. Howard Coffin’s debilitating struggle to retain family title to his elegant resort on Sea Island, and the untimely death of his wife, led to his suicide in 1937.
R.J. Reynolds, or R. J. as he was known, become the third major owner of this southern island paradise, a far different and more flamboyant proprietor than his predecessors. Despite the fact that he had maintained large homes in New York, Florida, and Europe and was a racing member of the New York Yacht Club – as well as a heavy-drinking member of N.Y. Cafe Society – trailing in his wake a succession of ex-wives, Reynolds settled himself on Sapelo Island prepared to conduct a somewhat quieter life. Hiring a wildlife artist of renown, Athos Menaboni, R. J. enhanced the interior of Coffin’s already amazing structure – adding: a series of painted images of tropical birds, animals, and pirates to the walls of the solarium; a tented ceiling and circus decorations to the ballroom; and gentle jungle decorations to the room overlooking the indoor pool.
External to the mansion, Reynolds constructed two elaborate boathouses and replaced the nearby farm structures with a glamorous quadrangle of coach houses and a dairy barn that contained a second floor motion picture theater. During my tour, I noted that these buildings had become office and laboratory for the Georgia State and Federal research projects now quartered on the island.
R. J. was also possessed of a serious side. During World War II, at Iwo Jima and in the Phillipines, as a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Navy he was awarded a Bronze Star for navigating his ship, the USS Makin Island, out from under Japanese Kamikaze suicide plane attacks. And although he worked only briefly as a youngster in the Reynolds cigarette factories, he did serve as a Director of R. J. Reynolds from 1942 to 1947. Much more of his time was spent financing and directing Delta and Piedmont airlines to success and tending to investments that ranged from rescuing the bankrupt American Mail Line steamship company in Seattle to his holdings in Coca-Cola and Monsanto Chemical Co.
In his later years, R.J. grew oddly reclusive, digging up buried sacks of gold he had buried around the island against another depression. He summoned the neglected children of his four wives and scolded them for living off family money rather than holding down jobs. Obtusely, R.J. had been much freer with the local community of Darien, a frequent recipient of his charitable works.
The life of R.J. Reynolds, Jr. came to an end in Switzerland. There, in 1964 at the age of 58, he died of emphysema, a result of the R. J. Reynolds Company Camels and Winstons he’d chain-smoked ever since his teen-age years.
Being driven in Fran’s old van through the richly carpeted undergrowth and shadowy live oaks, it was easy to understand why both Coffin and Reynolds had fallen in love with Sapelo. A scalding Georgia sun splashed the foliage as Fran’s van bounced past the Reynolds mansion’s terrace pool and down the ruts leading to the beach. Breaking out into the sweet salt air, we arrived at a seaside pavilion elevated on pilings that faced a limitless white sand beach; not another soul was in sight.
Here, by prearrangement, I was to spend two hours with my boiled shrimp lunch gazing at the placid Atlantic Ocean. (Our two other passengers had departed the van onto a trail that would swing them out through the seaside bush and back onto the beach.) I had scarcely dug into my still delicious newspaper-wrapped shrimp when a noisy crowd of children piled out of several vans and mounted the pavilion stairs.
The noise died quickly when the bulging eyes of twenty-five black children fell upon a lone white man hungrily scooping a luncheon of shrimp off a plate of newsprint. They quietly set down numerous coolers of food and thermoses full of cold drinks; then pushed back down the stairs to the beach, soon laughing and dancing through the mild surf, the feel of wet sand between their toes. Near the sea-oat grass, at the of the sloping beach, a small group were staking out a buried nest of loggerhead turtle eggs already marked by Estuarine researchers.
A half hour later, the kids were offering me sips of their sodas, and two church supervisors were slicing off huge chunks of bright red watermelon – one of them graciously sent my way. The conversational ice broken, the kids wanted to know where I came from; they were from Savannah, down for the day, beneficiaries of some State program. The supervisors spoke of how Sapelo Island reached out to those who had left to work in high-paying jobs as far away as New York city – drawing them back to their roots and retirement at Hog Hammock. I came to realize how deeply their African heritage affected them: the enormous pride they felt in finally having traced their lineage to the African nation now called Sierra Leone. The supervisors explained how much R. J. Reynolds’ gift of Hog Hammock had meant to the Gullah residents; and what Reynolds’ bequest of the rest of the island – including the mansion and surrounding buildings – had meant to the University Of Georgia; the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve to NOAA; and what the Reynolds Wildlife Refuge had meant to the people of the State of Georgia.
Sapelo Island is a world unto itself; yet it’s not a perfect world. The conflict between SICARS (basically the Hog Hammock resident community) and the State is subtle, complex and ongoing; a matter of intense pride within the Gullah-Geechee settlement. In the short time I spent on the island, I got only the barest sense of it. The political conflicts beginning to surface across our nation bear an eerie similarity to what I sense may exist on Sapelo.
Why not set aside sufficient time to properly experience the Island? I’d have done better myself, if I’d been able to extend the time of my visit. Consider centering your visit around the Island Residents’ Cultural Day – October 21st – sponsored by SICARS. “Visitors can stay in the cottages and other accommodations owned by Sapelo residents, or in the Reynolds Mansion. For more info contact SICARS @ 912-485-2197 or email info@sapeloislandgeorgia.org.”
Standing on the deck of the Annemarie during the return trip to Meridian, I felt like I’d left a part of myself back on that barrier Island. I suspect that my first trip to Sapelo Island will not be my last…
