Some have characterized Jim Williams' life as a Horatio Alger story. Not so, said Kenneth Worthy II, an antiques dealer and friend of Williams. According to Worthy, Jim's parents were never poor. They weren't cash-rich, but they were quality people with decades of good breeding. Jim personally enjoyed researching and writing about his family's English heritage and its journey in the New World from Boston to central Georgia. They were a family of prosperous farmers.
James Arthur Williams was born December 11, 1930, in Gordon, a small mining and farming town east of Macon in rural Georgia. His father, Arthur Williams, was a barber and his mother, Blanche Brooks Williams, was a secretary for a local kaolin mining company. Jim's thick dark hair and good looks were a gift from his rakishly handsome father. He had one sibling, a younger sister, Dorothy, whom he nicknamed D.O., which was short for Dorothy Ollie.
In 1983, Jim wrote fondly about an idyllic childhood in a close-knit family of grandparents, uncles and aunts, who frequently got together at his grandparents' farm at Turkey Creek, some 18 miles from Gordon. Ultimately, his father and mother divorced and his father remarried, but his father and his new wife lived in close proximity to the children. A number of Jim's writings about the history of his family, his early interest in saving disappearing Georgia architecture, and stories about restoring homes in Savannah and South Carolina are captured in Savannah's Jim Williams and His Southern Houses by his sister, Dr. Dorothy Williams Kingery.
The entrepreneurial spirit was strong in Jim as a youngster. Worthy told me that even at the age of 14, Jim was buying and selling antiques he thought were valuable or could expand his knowledge. Jim's strong business sense and work ethic so impressed his school principal that once he let the teenager out of school to close a transaction. To encourage Jim's love of wooden furniture, his father built him a wood shop, which is still standing in an old tobacco barn, according to Worthy.
From his youth onward, Jim had a deep love and respect for history and its survivors, antique pottery, and furniture. It greatly pained him to see the destruction of so many fine old rural houses as enormous areas were cleared to plant pine trees for the pulp and paper industry. Later, this early fascination with history expanded beyond what he saw and found in central Georgia, even beyond colonial America, to the antique treasures of Europe and Asia that he would ultimately possess.
First, he had to go to college to get the credentials he needed to become a credible architectural preservationist. With the help of his mother's salary, he enrolled at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, to study interior design. At the same time, he studied antiques, architecture, and old houses. While at school, he also studied piano and organ. The normal program for an interior design certificate was three years, but he only attended for two, from August 1948 to May 1950. After art school, Jim studied at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Then he went to work with an interior design company in New Orleans, He was even in the Air Force for a short time before he settled in Savannah.