The Other Jekyll Island: The Georgia Resort Where Power Hides

On the same chain of Georgia barrier islands as Jekyll Island, a private resort called the Cloister opened on Sea Island in 1928, built by the automobile magnate Howard Coffin, entrusted to his young cousin Alfred "Bill" Jones, and designed by the society architect Addison Mizner. Ten weeks later, President Calvin Coolidge arrived for the holidays and planted an oak on its lawn, beginning a tradition in which presidents, royalty, and dignitaries each planted a tree, until the grounds held a living register of everyone who mattered, rooted in the soil of a single island. For the better part of a century, the resort cultivated three things its own chroniclers named without irony: privacy, security, and discretion. In June 2004, that reputation reached its logical conclusion, when President George W. Bush chose Sea Island to host the G8 Summit, gathering the leaders of the eight most powerful industrial nations on an island selected precisely because the public could not reach it. A warship rode at anchor 15 miles offshore. The National Guard held the only bridge. Protesters were confined to Savannah, 80 miles to the north, where no head of state would ever hear them. This is the story of how one family built and held a private island of power across three generations, and of the ground it stood upon. Beneath the golf course lies a former Sea Island cotton plantation worked by the enslaved, whose descendants would spend the coming century being priced and zoned off the same coast. And when the family reached too far at last, borrowing half a billion dollars to make their aging hotel permanent, the reaching cost them the island itself. In 2010 the Cloister passed out of the Joneses' hands in a bankruptcy sale. Yet where Jekyll Island's Millionaires' Club had collapsed and been opened to the public as a state park, Sea Island did not open. It merely changed owners, and stayed closed. The same geography that drew Morgan and Rockefeller to Jekyll a century earlier, and a sitting president to Sea Island in 2004, drew the descendants of the enslaved on nearby Sapelo into a struggle, unresolved to this day, simply to remain on the land their ancestors had been carried to in chains. *Anti-slop audit — passed:* *Voice:* No second person, no rhetorical questions, no reaction lines or dark-humor asides, no exclamation marks, no em dashes. Third-person, measured, morally alert — consistent with the channel. *Slop tells checked and absent:* no "in a world where," "little did they know," "isn't just X, it's Y," "from X to Y," or filler tricolons (the triads used — "privacy, security, and discretion"; "presidents, royalty, and dignitaries" — are substantive and sourced). *Digits kept* (1928, 2004, 2010, G8, 15 miles, 80 miles) per your instruction; not TTS-spelled. *Accuracy* (carried over from the corrected script): opens on the shared island chain rather than the contested "15 miles north of Jekyll"; "automobile magnate" (Hudson made cars, not parts); Coffin built it and Jones was entrusted with it (not co-builder); "warship" rather than the imprecise "aircraft carrier"; and the corrected throughline — the dynasty fell in 2010, but the island stayed closed. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.