BUTLER KING COUPER: He was born on the "Retreat" Plantation, St. Simon's Island, Georgia on 2 March 1851; he died in Spartanburg, South Carolina on 20 October 1913. Butler King Couper was the grandson of Thomas Butler King, a Georgia congressman and master of the famous "Retreat" plantation at the south end of St. Simons's Island, Georgia, and great-grandson of John Couper, master of the equally famous "Cannon's Point" plantation at the north end of St. Simon's. Butler King Couper's family had textile interests in north Georgia as well as their Sea-Island cotton plantations on the islands and Georgia coastal plain, so he naturally became a cotton factor. His first wife was Meta Habersham of the legendary Savannah family, who died young with the birth of their child, Butler King Couper, Jr. King's parents had moved to their home "Waverly" in Marietta, Georgia, to be near their textile interests and he moved there to start a new life after the loss of his wife and child. His best friend and hunting/riding companion was John Adams Sibley, son of Josiah Sibley and Emma Eve Longstreet of Augusta, who, with her sister Hannah had inherited Oswell Eve's "Cottage" from Sarah Eve Adams. Josiah Sibley's 1840s summer home "Cottage Hill " was between Marietta and Kennesaw Mountain, and was one of the few houses to survive the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and the Siege of Atlanta. Gen. William T. Sherman reputedly assigned a detachment of soldiers to protect it to prevent a diplomatic incident with England -- a British guest sitting out the war at the summer home had displayed the Union Jack as if the place were his own when the Federal forces swept toward it.
It was here that John Sibley and King Couper galloped up in the midst of a summer garden party and met John's younger sister, Emma Josephine Sibley, namesake of her aunt, Emmeline (Emma) Eve Smith, Oswell Eve's youngest surviving daughter. King and Jo instantly fell in love. At the time she was studying at the Arts League in New York, necessitating a long distance courtship. The next year, 1890, she repeated the "Grand Tour" of Europe that she had first made with her parents and siblings in 1879. As Jo's ship approached New York harbor, the pilot climbed on deck followed by King who had bribed the official with a case of champagne to allow him to ride out on the pilot boat and welcome her home before they docked -- with a ring. They were married shortly thereafter and settled first in Marietta, Georgia, then moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where King had opened a new office.
There, a son, the second Butler King Couper, Jr., was born in 1906. In 1913, in the midst of a world-wide cotton market collapse, the distressed father sat up all night to comfort his ill six-year-old son, suffered a massive heart attack, and was found dead holding his son's hand. He was interred in Cottage Cemetery near Joseph Eve, the inventor of the cotton gin.