Located in Richmond Hill, Georgia, a 18-mile drive from Savannah, on the gently meandering Ogeechee River, The Ford Plantation occupies a very special place in American history.

The Este Muskokee Indians lived here for centuries.  It was visited by Spanish and French explorers as far back as the 1500’s.  In 1734 it was part of a Royal Charter from the Crown of England.  In 1748 a Scotsman named John Harn created a rice plantation here, complete with dikes, jetties and lakes to control water flow.  By 1803 the land was a well-known Southern rice plantation held by Joseph Habersham, Mayor of Savannah and Post-master General under George Washington.

Here in 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect and designer of New York City’s Central Park was awed by the oak colonnades and declared, “I have hardly in all my life seen anything so impressively grand and beautiful.”

In the Mid-1920’s, Henry and Clara Ford bought the property once known as Sterling Bluff and Richmond Plantation along with the surrounding land – a total of 70,000 acres – as a winter retreat.  They purchased a nearby plantation house on the Savannah River and rebuilt it here as a classical Greek Revival mansion with dramatic views of the Ogeechee River and surrounding Low Country.  Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone were among the visitors here.

Today, The Ford Plantation, with its four miles of frontage on the Ogeechee River, is a private sporting community, where the mansion, now known as the Main House, has been preserved, surrounded by some of the largest live oaks in Georgia.

By any measure, this celebrated estate is unique in its charm, natural beauty and history.