Archibald C. McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia in 1842. During the Civil War, he served as a Confederate officer. After the war, he moved to Milledgeville, Georgia where he worked on a farm and met his wife, Sarah Spalding, granddaughter of Thomas Spalding who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island, Georgia. In 1869, he and his family moved to Sapelo Island to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. McKinley died in 1917.