Sea Island, Georgia

Sea Island is a privately owned, unincorporated area of Glynn County, Georgia, and is part of the Golden Isles of Georgia, which include St. Simons Island, Jekyll Island, Little St. Simons Island, and the mainland city of Brunswick. The well-visited seaside resort island is located along the Atlantic Coast just east of St. Simons Island. It lies about north of Jacksonville, Florida and about south of Savannah, Georgia, and is reachable via a causeway from St. Simons Island. The Anschutz family of Denver, Colorado owns two resorts with limited public access and maintains a gated community for around 500 single-family residences.

The resorts, Sea Island Beach Club and The Cloister, are located a short distance from one another, connected by a roundabout in the middle of Sea Island Drive, the island's main connecting road. The oceanfront Beach Club contains restaurants, a game room, a bowling alley, an ice cream shop, a bar, and three pools. Sea Island's main hotel, The Cloister, is located on its southwestern side along the Black Banks River. It includes restaurants, 200 rooms, a spa, tennis and squash courts, an exercise facility, and is home to the only Forbes Five Star restaurant in the state of Georgia, The Georgian Room. It is the only resort in the world to have received four Forbes Five-Star awards for ten consecutive years.

Georgia's Sea Island is part of a long chain of barrier islands, also known as "sea islands", located along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida between the Santee and St. Johns rivers.

History

Like many of the easternmost barrier islands of Georgia, Sea Island was formed about 5,000 years ago, after the last major ice age. Unlike the much older, Pleistocene-age islands just to its west, there is little information about early human activity on the island. Most of its recorded history dates from the beginning of the 20th century.

Its original English name was Fifth Creek Island. Its first known white settler was Captain James Mackay, who served under General Oglethorpe at Fort Frederica. Subsequent holders included a series of St. Simons Island plantation owners, who used the land primarily for grazing. In 1926, automobile magnate Howard Coffin added it to his other land purchases in coastal Georgia. Two years later, on the advice of friends who foresaw the potential in oceanfront properties, he opened the Cloister Hotel that was nicknamed the "Little Friendly Hotel" and turned over its management to his cousin, Alfred W. Jones. Upon Howard Coffin's death in 1937, A. W. Jones inherited the property, along with other tracts of nearby coastal land owned by the Sea Island Company.From its beginnings, the Cloister was a success, attracting a variety of "Roaring Twenties" luminaries. When President Calvin Coolidge decided to spend his Christmas holidays on Sea Island in 1928, the new hotel gained national attention. Promoted as a quiet, worry-free escape, as opposed to some of the high-energy resorts in Florida, the Cloister appealed to businessmen, politicians, and celebrities, including New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, Edsel Ford, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Eddie Rickenbacker

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