If you drive through Darien you won’t be able to miss this big old wooden boat sitting in the middle of town. It’s permanently “docked” beside the old McIntosh County Jail, which serves today as the arts center. After years away from Georgia, it was at the end of its service and was soon to be scrapped. Friends of the Kit Jones, in collaboration with local government and encouraged by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, wanted to save it and return it to Georgia, and that’s just what they did. The following history is abridged from their website which is really worth a read. The level of research they’ve done is impressive.

The Kit Jones was built to order for R. J. Reynolds, Jr., of pine and live oak milled on Sapelo Island, which Reynolds owned at the time. Blueprints for the vessel were drawn by prominent naval architects Sparkman & Stephens of New York and construction was overseen between 1938-1939 by Axel Sparre, a Danish shipwright who was living in nearby Brunswick. Gullah-Geechee residents of Sapelo provided much of the labor.

She is 60 feet long, 17 feet wide, 18 feet tall, and weighs 60,000 pounds. Her namesake is Katharine Talbott Jones (Kit), wife of Sea Island developer Alfred W. Jones. They traveled in the same circles as Reynolds and Jones had spent time on Sapelo with then-owner Howard Coffin the the 1920s.

The Kit Jones has served as a tugboat, a ferry for the people of Sapelo, a freight hauler, and, a fire boat during World War II. 

She began an association as a research vessel with the University of Georgia marine sciences program in 1953 that ended with her acquisition by the University of Mississippi in 1985. She served for many more years and was capsized by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She came back for a few more years but was finally retired in 2013.

Restoration work was done from 2019-2023 and everything looks ship shape. Ultimately, this is an amazing “save” and my hats are off to this community and especially the Friends of the Kit Jones.