Richmond Hill, Georgia: Henry Ford's Winter Kingdom

Just south of Savannah, the town of Richmond Hill grew up as the personal project of Henry Ford. In nineteen twenty-five Ford purchased around eighty-five thousand acres here along the Ogeechee River, around a small railroad stop called Ways Station. He built a winter home called the Richmond Plantation, built a chapel, established a school, and ran experimental farming and forestry projects.

He employed local people for more than two decades, building infrastructure that the county barely had otherwise. When Ford died in nineteen forty-seven, his estate sold the land and the company town dissolved. The community was renamed Richmond Hill in nineteen forty-one, and the city was incorporated in nineteen sixty-two.

Today it is one of Georgia's fastest-growing cities, its Ford-era chapel and one-room schoolhouses still standing as quiet evidence of an eccentric industrialist's surprisingly earnest vision of a model rural community.