08/15/2026
McIntosh County, Sapelo Island, 1920s…A remarkably informal gathering on Sapelo Island brings together members of the Ford family with automobile pioneer Howard E. Coffin. From left are Henry Ford II, Benson Ford, Edsel Ford, Eleanor Clay Ford, Katharine Talbott Jones (Mrs. A. W. Jones), and Howard E. Coffin—with one very confident chicken claiming the foreground.
The Georgia Archives dates the photograph broadly to the 1920s. Henry Ford II, born in 1917, and his younger brother Benson, born in 1919, were the two oldest sons of Edsel and Eleanor Ford. Their father, Edsel, had been president of Ford Motor Company since 1919. Henry Ford II would eventually become president of the company himself in 1945 and lead it through much of the postwar era.
Their host, Howard Earle Coffin, was an important figure in the early automobile industry and one of the founders of the Hudson Motor Car Company. In 1912, Coffin purchased most of Sapelo Island—excluding the land held by the island’s Black communities—and transformed it into an elaborate coastal estate. Between 1922 and 1925 he rebuilt and greatly enlarged the old Thomas Spalding mansion at the island’s south end. He also developed farming, cattle raising, timbering and seafood operations while building roads and drilling artesian wells.
The Ford and Coffin connections were more than casual acquaintances. Historian Buddy Sullivan notes that the Coffin, Ford and Torrey families—all connected to Detroit’s automobile world—were close friends who shared an interest in Georgia’s coast.
The other woman in the photograph, identified by the Archives simply as “Mrs. A. W. Jones,” was Katharine Talbott Jones, wife of Coffin’s young cousin Alfred W. Jones Sr. Jones became deeply involved in Coffin’s coastal ventures, and in 1928 Coffin turned management of the new Sea Island Company over to him. That company would develop the famous Cloister resort and help shape Sea Island and St. Simons for generations.
Coffin’s Sapelo estate became a gathering place for some extraordinary visitors. Calvin Coolidge came in 1928, Charles Lindbergh in 1929, and Herbert Hoover in 1932. This photograph reminds us that, for a brief period, a quiet Georgia barrier island became something of a southern retreat for some of the most influential people in American industry and public life.
And yet, more than ninety years later, I suspect many of us look at all those famous names…and notice the chicken first.
Georgia on My Mind curated by Lisa Land Cooper - Author and Historian
© 2026 Lisa Land Cooper – Author and Historian
