from Harbinger article   Dauphin Island is fourteen miles long, with an eastern portion heavily wooded, wider and more elevated than the wind- and water-swept western portion. Over the centuries, Gulf waters have washed away and then rebuilt portions of the island. The east end is the most stable. During the nineteenth century the Gulf swept away miles of the present island's western portion . The federal government constructed Fort Gaines at the east end of the island in the early 1800s. By the end of that century, the federal government owned nearly 1,000 acres around the fort, a tract that extended to the present-day Cadillac Square Park. Land records in Mobile County Probate Court examined by The Harbinger show that in 1911, Congress sold 700 acres of this land to the Dauphin Island Railway and Harbor Company on the condition that within four years the company would build a railroad bridge from the mainland, and a dock on the Gulf to off-load cargo. During the next several years, the syndicate involved in the railway project bought and consolidated ownership of most of Dauphin Island. It was during these years that the name of Forney Johnston first appears in probate court records. Johnston was the son of former Alabama Governor and U.S. Senator, Joseph F. Johnston. The elder Johnston served in the Congress from 1907 until his death in 1913.
Some years later, Frank Boykin, Mobile's Congressman from 1935 until 1962, joined Forney Johnston and other business people to form Gulf Properties Corporation. Boykin had made a fortune through land speculation before he entered Congress. Since the early 1900s he had bought and sold land and timber throughout south Alabama. According to a probate court document the Gulf Properties Corporation was organized in 1930 to acquire and hold land on Dauphin Island until a bridge and other developments would add "to the value and use or marketability of the land thereon." By 1953 Gulf Properties held most of Dauphin Island.
Another version, attributed to Frank Boykin, of how Gulf Properties acquired the island appeared in a 1973 book by Edward Boykin, Everything's Made for Love in This Man's World: Vignettes from the Life of Frank W. Boykin. In this account, the prosperous Boykin met a man named Breck Musgrove, of Jasper, Alabama, on a train trip from New York in 1929. Musgrove approached Boykin for a $50,000 loan, offering to "put up Dauphin Island as collateral." Boykin and several others made the loan. Eighteen months later, after Musgrove failed to pay it back, Boykin, Forney Johnston, T. J. Rester, and Judge Matt Boykin, Frank Boykin's brother, took title to "over ninety percent of Dauphin Island." The partners then formed the Gulf Properties Corporation.