The Dodge Family Plot
The Dodge Family was a prominent early family of St. Simons Island, remembered for their role in the island’s development and community life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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The most easily recognized and frequently visited plot is that of the Dodge family, located behind the church. Anson Greene Phelps Dodge Jr. and his first wife, Ellen Dodge, are buried on the far right in a shared grave marked by a simple raised flat stone bearing only their initials. To their left rests Anson’s mother, Rebecca Dodge, followed by their young son, Anson Greene Phelps Dodge III, whose grave is marked by crosses at the head and foot. At the end lies Anson’s second wife, Anna Gould Dodge, whose grandfather, James Gould, built and served as the keeper of the island’s first lighthouse on St. Simons Island.
At age 19, Anson Greene Phelps Dodge Jr., a member of the wealthy Phelps Dodge industrial family, arrived on St. Simons Island in 1879 in connection with his family’s lumber mill on the island’s south end. While exploring the island, he discovered the deteriorating remains of the 1820 building of Christ Church Frederica and felt called to the priesthood. He promised the local community he would return as a priest, build a new church, and serve as its rector.
Dodge fulfilled that promise—funding the construction of the present church, establishing more than 30 Episcopal missions across southeast Georgia, and endowing an orphanage for boys. His life, however, was marked by tragedy, including the death of his first wife, Ellen Ada Phelps Dodge, who died of cholera at age 21 while traveling in India. Dodge brought her body back to St. Simons and built the church in her memory. After his death in 1898 at age 38, she was reinterred beside him in the Dodge family plot behind the church.
The remarkable life of Anson Dodge inspired The Beloved Invader by Eugenia Price, part of her St. Simons Trilogy.
In 1890, seven years after the death of his first wife, Anson Greene Phelps Dodge Jr. married Anna Deborah Gould Dodge, one of the eleven children of his close friend Horace Bunch Gould and the granddaughter of James Gould.
Anna became a devoted partner to Dodge, caring for him during the illnesses that marked the final years of his life. Though often described in the novels of Eugenia Price’s St. Simons Trilogy as being “older” than her husband, the difference was only about three years.
After Dodge’s death in 1898, Anna continued the work they had begun together. She outlived him by nearly three decades and took an active leadership role in the boys’ orphanage they had established near Christ Church Frederica. Managing its finances and caring deeply for the children, she remained a guiding presence in their lives, signing letters to many of them—long after they had grown to adulthood—simply as “Mama.”
The orphanage building can be seen to the right.
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