In the summer of 1926, Howard Coffin, the new owner of Sea Island, and Eugene Lewis, Coffin’s partner at the Sea Island Company, began to realize their plans for a golf complex on the southern end of St. Simons Island. The blueprints included a large central building with a restaurant and guest rooms, as well as access to a golf course that highlighted the area’s natural beauty and the nearby Avenue of the Oaks. It would all, in Coffin’s plan, be united under one name: the Tolomato Country Club.
Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Postcard depicting Tolomato Golf Club circa 1927
Today, we know the same area as the Lodge at Sea Island Golf Club. The original plans for the Tolomato Country Club, created by New York architects Charles Wellford Leavitt & Son, were never completed. What prompted the name change — and where did the Tolomato name come from?
The push to build Tolomato began with golf journalist and course architect Walter Travis’s visit to Coastal Georgia in 1926. Travis wasn’t in the area to visit Sea Island or St. Simons, though — instead, he was maintaining a decades-long relationship with the nearby Jekyll Island Club. He first worked with the Club in 1900, when he reviewed and improved the island’s first golf course, designed by Willie Dunn, Jr. Now, Travis had returned to design Jekyll’s nine-hole Great Dunes Course. Eugene Lewis was eager for Travis to design a course for Sea Island as well.
Inspired by the scenery and tranquility of the area, Travis designed the predecessor of today’s Plantation Course. Although Travis died just a year later in 1927, his design remained at the center of the new Tolomato Country Club. On the evening of February 10, 1927, a group gathered at the Brunswick Board of Trade to formally create the Tolomato C.C., as it was often called. Thirty signed on as the organization’s charter members. The Country Club wouldn’t maintain its name for long. It was still referred to as Tolomato through about October 1927, but the name fell out of use afterwards. According to Gary A. Galyean, author of At the End of the Oaks: The Official History of the Sea Island Golf Club, the reasoning behind the name change was relatively simple. Since the island once known as Glynn Isle was now called Sea Island, for consistency’s sake, the new golf complex was named the Sea Island Golf Club.
Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Postcard depicting golfers and clubhouse at Tolomato Golf Club, circa 1927
Why had the name Tolomato been used in the first place? Galyean explains that the name stemmed from Howard Coffin’s early Georgia days on Sapelo Island. A site known as Tolomato, supposedly the remains of a Spanish mission or Native American village, sat north of Darien and just across the water from Sapelo itself. For Coffin, writes Galyean, names like Tolomato “were intriguing and dramatic, and reflected [Coffin’s] respect for and knowledge of local history.”
This month’s featured images from the Coastal Georgia Historical Society are postcards of what was then known as the Tolomato Country Club. These postcards show the clubhouse and golfers, accompanied by a caddy, on the grounds of the Walter Travis-designed course.
The Coastal Georgia Historical Society presents this article and images from our archives as part of our mission “to connect people to Coastal Georgia’s dynamic history.” The Society operates the iconic St. Simons Lighthouse Museum and the World War II Home Front Museum, housed in the Historic Coast Guard Station at East Beach. To learn more about the Society, its museums, diverse programs, and membership, please visit coastalgeorgiahistory.org.
