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Georgia appraised Ossabaw Island at $16 million in 1978 and Sandy West sold it to the state for half that, keeping a life estate on 23 acres around the family house; she lived there until she was 103, died on her 108th birthday, and the 26,000-acre island still has no bridge and no airfield
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When she inherited it in 1960, she and her husband turned the retreat outward, founding the Ossabaw Foundation and running the island for two decades as a sanctuary for working minds: writers, painters, composers and scientists came for weeks at a time under the Ossabaw Island Project, alongside a rougher program called the Genesis Project that let students live off the land. Georgia’s appraisers valued the island at $16 million in 1978, real money against the family’s circumstances, and by then-Governor George Busbee’s account the negotiations needed the personal mediation of Jimmy Carter, who as a former Georgia governor spent two days on the island brokering terms between a state with a thin budget and an owner with thick conditions.