2nd Annual Owen Burns Celebration - Honoring John Hamilton Gillespie

Save the Colson Hotel! Say NO to Demolition! Say YES to Preservation!

The developer of the Colson Hotel will appear before the Sarasota City Commission on Tuesday September 3rd seeking a demolition permit.

***ATTEND the City Commissioners Meeting
9:00 am Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Sarasota City Hall, 1565 1st Street, Sarasota, FL 34236

***SIGN THE LETTER and EMAIL our Sarasota City Commissioners asking that they not allow the developer to destroy the iconic Colson Hotel.
https://bit.ly/3XmAOHT

The Colson Hotel, built in 1925, was part of Sarasota’s real estate boom in the 1920s and is integral to the cultural heritage of Sarasota’s African American community. It was the only hotel in Sarasota that allowed African Americans to stay there during Jim Crow. It is one of the last remaining vestiges of Overtown, our original black community that is now being gentrified.

Support the preservation of our historic heritage. The Sarasota City code and the Historic Preservation Web site states “…"It shall be the goal of the City of Sarasota to identify, document, protect, preserve, and enhance all cultural, historic, architectural, archaeological resources of the City."

***LEARN MORE about the Preservation Plan by the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation:
https://www.preservesrq.org/post/colson-hotel-may-be-demolished

Vickie Oldham Lorrie Muldowney Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition, Inc.

Flashback Friday 6-23-23: Wonderful memories at William Hartman Gallery 48 South Palm Avenue, a sponsor during the 2010 Owen Burns Celebration and 2011 John Hamilton Gillespie weeks.

Hartman Gallery is a treasure trove of historical artwork, featuring Florida landscape paintings and vintage photographic images of Sarasota and Florida. https://www.wmhartmangallery.biz/about

Sadly, the owner of the building is forcing the business to close after 47 years. Future plans for the building remain unknown. Sarasota is losing one of her most unique and special downtown businesses. The Gallery will be sorely missed.

11 Years Ago - time for another round?!

In 2017, Harriet Burns Stieff was interviewed by Bianca Persechino, a third year student at New College of Florida. This oral history, among many others, was created in a collaborative project involving New College of Florida and Sarasota County with the guidance of Dr. Erin Dean, associate professor of anthropology.

Harriet Stieff, the youngest daughter of early Sarasota developer Owen Burns and Vernona Freeman Burns was born on July 31, 1922 and died on June 2, 2022. She spent her childhood in Sarasota, Florida and grew up with four siblings, Lillian Burns, Owen Burns, Leonard Burns, and Vernona Burns. Harriet attended the Out of Doors School on Siesta Key until she went up north to attend Goucher College, where she majored in science. In 1942, while attending Goucher, she met her husband Lorin, and together they had three children: Rick, Charles, and Cathy. Harriet spent 18 years teaching kindergarten in Montgomery County, Maryland. After she retired, she spent another 18 years volunteering for the flower guild at the National Cathedral as well as volunteering for several years at the Adams Morgan School. Harriet was a member of the Historical Society of Sarasota County.

Oral History Video: Harriet Stieff on her memories in Sarasota Harriet Stieff was born on July 31st in 1922 and spent her childhood in Sarasota, Florida. She grew up with four siblings, Lillian Burns, Owen Burns, Leonard...

In fond remembrance Harriet Burns Stieff The Historical Society of Sarasota County, indeed all who live or visit here, owe a great debt of gratitude to Harriet Burns Stieff, who passed away after 10 decades of graciou…

Harriet Burns Stieff, 99, the youngest daughter of early Sarasota developer Owen Burns and Vernona Freeman Burns, died peacefully at home surrounded by family on June 2, 2022. Harriet was born in New York City on July 31st, 1922, while her mother was visiting family and was brought shortly thereafter to Sarasota, where she spent her childhood. She attended the Out-of-Door School (now Out-of-Door Academy) and graduated from Sarasota High School. “Sarasota was a wonderful place to grow up,” she was fond of saying of the city boom days of the 1920s and early 30s. After her father’s death, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she graduated from Goucher College, with a major in Biology.

She married Lorin Rollins Stieff in Annapolis, MD, on June 24, 1944, where their son Frederick Rollins Stieff was born a year later. The adventuresome young family moved first to Palo Alto, CA, and later to the Colorado Plateau, where Lorin worked in the field as a geologist. They settled in Kensington, MD, and, after the births of their son Charles Burns Stieff and daughter Catherine Lillian Stieff, Harriet earned a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of Maryland, specializing in early childhood education. She taught Kindergarten in the Montgomery County (Maryland) School system where she instilled her love of learning in young children for 19 years. She was an active member of All Saints Episcopal Church and served on the flower guild of the Washington National Cathedral for 19 years.

After she retired from teaching, Harriet and Lorin returned to her beloved Sarasota, where she was an active member of the Founders Garden Club of Sarasota, the Historical Society of Sarasota (where she served on the Advisory Board and was awarded HSOSC’s Distinguished Service award in 2015), and the Church of the Redeemer. “I’ve lived a blessed life,” Harriet said to all, recounting her love of family, flowers, baseball and children. She loved telling stories of early Sarasota history and shared her knowledge and wisdom generously with all.

Nothing was more important to Harriet than her family, and she relished her role as family matriarch. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband Lorin Rollins Stieff, to whom she was married for 72 years, her parents Owen and Vernona (Freeman) Burns, and her four siblings. Her indomitable spirit lives on in her children Frederick Rollins Stieff (and Kelly Ide Stieff), of Leesburg, VA, Charles Burns Stieff (and Linda Paine) of Garrett Park, MD, Catherine Stieff Gotschall (and Steve Luchter) of North Port, FL, as well as her grandchildren, Lorin Carr Stieff, Alexandra Stieff Davis (and John Davis), Caroline Calloway, Stephen Ide (and Hannah Manke Ide), Katie Ide, Taunton Paine (and Nikki Ferraiolo), her great-grandchildren, Matthew Rollins Davis and Lauren Burns Davis, and many nieces, nephews.

A service in celebration of Harriet's life will be held on what would have been her 100th birthday, July 31st at 4:00 pm at the Church of the Redeemer, 222 South Palm Ave. Friends may send memorial donations in her name to the Church of the Redeemer, the Children’s Literacy Initiative, or to the Lillian Grant Burns Memorial Fund for Research & Preservation of Sarasota County History.

Vernona and Owen Burns, who came from a family of eight brothers and a sister, had five children: Lillian, Owen Jr., Leonard, Vernona (known as Sug), and Harriet. Lillian (who became a leading advocate for the preservation of Sarasota County history) fondly recalled that her father was very much the family man who loved to be home for dinner at 6 o'clock with Vernona and his children.

December 26, 2021
Real History by Jeff LaHurd, Special to the Herald-Tribune
John Hamilton Gillespie, Sarasota’s Founding Golfer

No one knows that exact time or even day or month that the first golf ball felt the smack of hard wood sending it into Sarasota’s sky. For the local pioneers, golf was not on anyone’s radar, and if was witnessed at all, the event would have seemed rather odd. What the heck was golf anyway?

But we do know that the golfer was John Hamilton Gillespie, and the “course” was a two-hole practice area near his home, close to today’s post office building on Ringling Blvd.

To the manor born, the tall young Scottish gentleman swatting the orb back and forth, arrived in Sarasota in 1886 with golf sticks among his luggage. He was described by one of the locals as a large man, standing 6 feet tall, weighing approximately 250 pounds with a 48-inch chest.

According to Alex Browning, one of the colonists: “The natives and early settlers came to look upon him as a great big boy who could take a joke and was ready to do a good turn for his neighbors.”

Gillespie had been sent by his father, the President of the Florida Mortgage and Investment Company, on a mission to rejuvenate their failed effort to colonize what was being billed as “a little Scotland” on the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the 50,000 plus acres they were trying to sell to start a new homeland was mostly a wilderness with no infrastructure.

For Gillespie the task of transforming a rugged, backwater fishing and agriculture village into a true town was daunting. But even though he had no development/building experience he was up to the overwhelming responsibility and made Sarasota’s success his life’s work.

Perhaps whacking the ball here and there relieved some of the stress. A reminder of his more civilized life when golf was his passion.

Witnesses to his daily battle with the little ball could be forgiven if they thought he was affected.

He liked to tell the story of being mistaken for a suspicious character when he was in another Florida town, designing a golf course. He was reported as a miscreant to law enforcement. In another community he was nearly shot by “an excited and inebriated cowboy, who spied me as I passed the saloon in my red [golfing] coat.”

His love for the sport began when his grandfather gifted him a set of McEvan and Philip golf clubs. He was eight years old, and in short order golf became his passion. As he matured, he became a fine player, noted throughout Florida for his skill and knowledge of the game.

The Sarasota Times called him “perhaps the most ardent of golfers” who “spends many hours every day in the winter season practicing difficult hazards and making famous shots.”
The paper reported “his judgement is the criterion to which all disputes are taken for settlement.”

In those long-ago years the clubs were made of hickory shafts wrapped with sheep skin. Each had a name: niblick, lofter, mashie, mashie niblick, midiron cique.

Oh, add one other. As the Church of Scotland frowned on Sunday golf, the industrious Scots developed what was called a Sunday or sabbath stick. Disguised as a cane, the club head was a perfect fit into the palm, and faster than you could say it’s a sin to golf of Sunday, it could be reversed for a few practice swings with no one the wiser.

Wooden tees came later. The ball was usually set atop sand. The British ball was smaller than its American counterpart.

As a reward for his hard work and industriousness, when the town of Sarasota was incorporated in 1902, Gillespie was elected the first mayor and became known throughout the state as the “golfing mayor.”

As his manservant and friend, Leonard Reid, who arrived in Sarasota in 1900 as a lanky 19-year-old, recalled for an article in the Sarasota Herald, Nov. 12, 1952, he and Gillespie laid out the city’s first links.

The duo walked for miles through palmettos and brush as Gillespie sketched what would become a nine-hole golf course. Later 50 men grubbed the palmettos and set up the fairways.

Reid indicated the fairways were 30 to 40 feet wide and stated, “That’s why the Colonel was so good. He’d always win his match because he could shoot straight. Colonel Gillespie only took a half a swing, and the other men always could out-hit him. But they would end up in the woods while Colonel got in the hole.”

The first hole went east from Links Ave. toward today’s County Administration Building, the second further east, the third doglegged a bit; the fourth and fifth was the turn for home and the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth all headed west ending conveniently in front of Gillespie’s house.

Reid recalled that the seventh hole (where today’s Kane Building is) had a swamp water hazard; Gillespie referred to it as his “sporty” hole.

He shared his expertise by writing a golf column for the New York Golf and The Golfers Magazine. In recalling the earlier days, he remembered that women were not welcomed on the links.

He wrote in 1887, “As for (the golfer’s wife), she must amuse herself as best she can; she cannot even accompany him in his game as a spectator, the presence of ladies being by no means regarded with favor and the links is not the place for women; they talk incessantly, they never stand still, and if they do the wind won’t allow their dresses to stand still.”

In 1905 Gillespie built a clubhouse to go with his nine-hole course, and it became the site of many social events. Women were encouraged to take up the sport, chitter-chatter notwithstanding.

As the sport grew in popularity, he became known throughout the state as the Father of Golf in Florida. He had established courses in Bellaire, Winter Park, Kissimmee, Jacksonville, Tampa and Cuba.

One bright January afternoon in 1923, The Sarasota Times correspondent Harry C. Green sat with Gillespie on his porch near the ninth hole to discuss what for Gillespie had become a way of life, espousing the benefits of the great game.

The article came with the fanciful and fictitious headline: FOUNDED TOWN TO GET HIMSELF A GOLF GAME IS STORY OF COL. GILLESPIE.

As the reporter listened, the elderly golfing legend and town builder espoused what could be religious tenants. Young Green asked him about what the game could do for the man morally. Gillespie, a founder of the Church of the Redeemer and a Lay Reader, replied, “For one, golf teaches self-control, one of the greatest lessons that a man can learn. He must train his hands and eyes to coordinate. He must cultivate patience.”

He believed firmly that the sport taught honesty. As he put it, “Cheating at golf is like cheating at solitaire.” This was a gentleman’s pastime. “A man must play golf like a gentleman whether he is a gentleman or not.”

He shared that golf was self-reflective. “A man comes to know his own weakness and to work long and patiently to overcome it.”

On Sept. 7, 1923, Gillespie left his home at Golf Hall to give instructions to his workers and collapsed on the links. The Father of Sarasota died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

He was eulogized by The Sarasota Times: “The Colonel was a great man. His passing leaves us lonely, mournful, filled with grief. Yet his noble soul will live on forever ... his memory is imperishable.”

The paper ended: “Goodbye ‘Jim,’ ye were a bonnie laddie and your heart was young.”

Jeff LaHurd was raised in Sarasota and is an award-winning author/historian.

REAL HISTORY
Tracing Sarasota's History With Voices From The Past
By Jeff LaHurd
Herald-Tribune, November 8, 2020

The Egyptians believe that you die twice. Once when your final breath is taken, and again the last time someone speaks your name.

I think of that when I read, write or lecture about Sarasota’s citizens who are no longer with us. In that light, I thought it would be of interest to trace some of our history through their quotes, to let them speak for themselves long after they died. For those whom I could not find a quote, I used one by those who knew them.

When the failed Scot Colony steamed into Sarasota Bay in December of 1885, a look at the shoreline from the deck was all it took for them to realize the horrid truth — they had been duped. The “Little Scotland” they were promised by salesmen was a wilderness that they were ill prepared to cope with. Alex Browning, a youngster when the Colony came ashore put it best: “Of course there was much discontent, being dumped like this, in a wild country without houses to live in, tired and hungry, one can imagine what it was like.”

In the summer of 1886, Anton Kleinoscheg who arrived ahead of the Colony wrote to a friend of the angst engendered by mosquitoes: “I look with rather unfriendly eyes at the clouded sky which constantly sends down the water masses that stand in ponds and depressions and generate millions of these beasts. They have killed two of my dogs (a horrible end). When I work ... I fall a victim to their bloodthirstiness, and I think no girl can await her sweetheart with so much longing as I am awaiting the end of the rainy season.”

Most of the disillusioned colonists departed after a few months. Shortly before leaving, Dan McKinlay cited some of the hardships: “Prospects here are so bad ... in fact as far as we can see it means starvation if we stay ... again, prairie fires some distance from us ... high wind blowing and some rain ... the colony seems to have completely broken up.”

Ben Stickney, loved throughout Sarasota as Uncle Ben, the gentlemen for whom the Stickney Point Bridge and Stickney Point Road are named, threw beach picnics for the locals and welcomed one and all. Rose Wilson, The Sarasota Times publisher wrote of him: “He was cultivated in much and of good blood and breeding. He was a friend to all and a foe to none. His nature was transparent ... his spirit genial, his hands open, and his heart kind.”

Chicago Society queen Bertha Palmer arrived in 1910. Of her business acumen, The Sarasota Times enthused: “With a foresight equal to that one might expect from the shrewdest financier of modern times, Mrs. Potter Palmer has just closed a deal that gives her complete control of Florida’s richest virgin soil.” Putting her achievement in perspective the paper went on: “Mrs. Palmer demonstrated shrewdness in handling business that some of our Napoleons of finance might adopt and at the same time improve their financial standing.”

When Davie Lindsay Worcester took a launch to Bird Key, still a small uninhabited island, she was awed by its tropical beauty and wrote to her husband, Thomas: “This is what I want for my old age … Oh! Words cannot paint the scene — imagination cannot conceive of such grandeur.” He and Davie bought the island and built her dream home. Unfortunately, she died before the home was completed. Of the mansion, known as New Edzell Castle after Davie’s ancestral home in Scotland, The Sarasota Times reported: “All the guests were frankly and even loudly outspoken in exclamations of delight and sincere admiration.”

When the 1920s real estate boom hit, long time resident and Sarasota attorney, Lamar Dozier recalled, “Sarasota was electric with excitement.”

A.B. Edwards, the city of Sarasota’s first mayor remarked: “It would have taken 100 years for the average city to acquire what Sarasota did in that boom period.”

On the downside, real estate man Roger Flory recalled that some of the developers were just out for a fast buck: “Some of the subdivisions were underwater; some had an underlying hardpan while others were too far removed from the center of activity to warrant their existence.”

After the bust, real estate men whom Edwards said, “Were sleeping in cars, on benches, and at the train station, left as quickly as they arrived. The water had been squeezed out of the sponge.”

Spring Training has been popular in Sarasota since the mighty John J. McGraw brought the powerhouse New York Giants to Sarasota in 1924. All of baseball’s greats played here. Giants slugger Rogers Hornsby was asked why he did not play golf. “When I hit a ball, I want someone else to chase it,” he replied.
The Boston Red Sox trained here from 1933 until they unexpectedly left town in 1958. Their first baseman Jimmy Foxx, who was so strong it was said even his hair had muscles, was nicknamed the Beast. When asked how to pitch to him, one hurler replied. “I’d rather not throw the ball at all.”

Baseball manager Bill Veeck, the colorful “Barnum of Baseball” who was in charge of the Chicago White Sox when they trained here in 1960 remarked, “The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.” White Sox pitcher Early Wynn, well known for brushing batters away from the plate with an inside fastball, was asked if he would bean his mother. “Only if she was digging in,” he shot back. Another time he said on the same subject: “It would depend on how well she was hitting.” Of Wynn, it was said, “That SOB was so mean he would knock you down in the dugout.”

Professor Ellis Freeman who built the Four Seasons Apartments wrote of Sarasota’s appeal in 1950: “The town had the tone and charm of a fishing village ... Artists and writers and professors like myself loved it for the complete absence of resort commercialism. It was what one hoped to find on Cape Cod and never did.”

Sarasota’s great architect Tim Seibert waxed sentimental about Sarasota and his involvement in its changes over the years: When asked about Longboat Key, he said, “It was a beautiful piece of nature in the 1940s. I always thought of it as a wild tropical Island. Now I’m playing a considerable role in its development, and, yes that gives me a lot to think about. I honestly don’t know what I would do if I could turn back the hands of time on Longboat.”

Of the re-routing of US 41 along the downtown bayfront at the end of the 1950s, Architectural Forum editor Douglass Haskell was not pleased: “Its murder ... I shout outrage ... it’s a filthy, dirty crime. It’s unforgivable and idiotic, cutting off the community from where five years ago people could go to the pier and enjoy fishing and the bay.”

The News writer, Betty Burkett expressed the same sentiment with an economy of words: “A deed so ugly it will remain like a welt across the minds of our people for decades to come.”
During the movement to integrate Sarasota, African American activist Gene Carnegie staged a sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter. He told a local reporter, “I could have easily brought 40 people in here and another 200 outside picketing. But that would incite trouble and would not be in the best interests of the community.”

Some years later, Fredd Atkins Sarasota’s African American city commissioner and a former mayor spoke to Herald Tribune writer, Barbara Peters Smith about the segregated Lido Casino: “I can’t tell you much about the Lido Casino because when I was a boy we were never allowed to go there. So I don’t miss it at all. I didn’t even know it was beautiful.”

Ken Thompson, Sarasota’s 35-year city manager, integrated the library and the municipal golf course on his authority. Having done so, Karl Bickel, the retired UPI chief wrote to him, “Your statesmanship and far vision handling of the recent situation at the golf course was so sound and constructive that I am moved to express my personal admiration and thanks.”

Finally, wise words from John Hamilton Gillespie, the town of Sarasota’s first mayor who was sent to revive the failed Scot Colony, “Be not too zealous to get rich, nor too easily tired of work, and follow a careful observance of the Golden Rule.”

REAL HISTORY: Jeff LaHurd: Tracing Sarasota's history with voices from the past Tracing some of Sarasota's history through their quotes, to let them speak for themselves long after they died.

WOW, what wonderful memories! 10 years ago today — the Owens Burns Celebration Reception and Book Release Party at Mattison's! Everyone sported a snappy Owens hat and bought copies of Jeff LaHurd's book, proving, once again, that Sarasota's History can be FUN!

Ad Blitz in 1920s Spurred Growth in Sarasota

The flowery prose and pie-in-the-sky promises helped Sarasota's population soar from 2,940 in 1920 to 8,248 by 1925.

By Jeff LaHurd, 10-11-20, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

The earliest advertisements regarding Sara Sota were rosy enough to persuade a Scottish group of sixty-plus men, women, and their families to sell everything they could not bring, and set off for an unknown “Little Scotland” on the far-away coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

They left an economically depressed Scotland to begin anew as gentlemen farmers and lead the good life in sun-drenched and breeze cooled Sarasota.

To underscore that hopeful notion, streets on the plat map they were shown were named after the fruits they would easily grow Orange, Lemon, Lime, Pineapple, Mango and Strawberry.

The utopia they bought into was based on a report by Captain H.S. Du Val at the behest of Governor W.D. Bloxham. Captain Du Val scouted the area and noted the crops he observed at various settlements.

Du Val failed to mention the black clouds of mosquitoes (An early settler called them a “plague.”), or the snakes, large insects and wild animals that were pervasive. And while a breeze could be cooling, the area was often oppressively hot. A rainy season could wash away crops, and not all the land was suitable for farming, even if they could find their plot somewhere off in the woods.

Not even the rudiments of a Little Scotland awaited. The area they bought was mostly a vast and unforgiving wilderness for which they were ill-prepared to deal with.

The beleaguered colony quickly failed, but not the notion that Sara Sota could become a habitable settlement.
A new manager, John Hamilton Gillespie pressed forward, putting into place the basics of a small community, including a hotel, and very slowly Sarasota inched forward.

In 1888 the Company thought that Sara Sota offered enough to advertise the area through a promotional booklet, aimed “at all who are seeking homes or health, investments or recreation.”
Testimonials included fishing opportunities, “from its waters are taken, in great abundance - the mullet, the pompano, the grouper, the sheep head — oysters, clams and crabs.” Farming, “the soil and climate will produce almost anything.” The booklet invited, “Come to Sarasota, where we think, can be seen the prettiest place on the coast of America…”

As to how much a new life in Sara Sota would cost, “A few hundred dollars, judiciously invested in a farm, well located, forms the nucleus around which a man can gather happiness and fortune.”

A testimonial from C.M. Robinson underscored the potential for a hardworking person to make a go of it: “If a man can’t make a living here he can’t make it anywhere. I ran away from a ship in Key West and came here and I have made good ... It is the easiest country to make a living and the easiest to get ahead.”
It was a nondescript advertisement placed in the Chicago Tribune in the winter of 1910 which sped up the process of Sarasota becoming a desirable snowbird retreat.

Placed among pages full of other notices by a major landowner J.H. Lord, working with A.B. Edwards the five sentence ad under the headline, FLORIDA mentioned the citrus and vegetable growing possibilities, and the beautiful winter homes available.
Straightforward stuff that piqued the curiosity of Chicago society leader, the world-renowned Bertha Honore’ Palmer.
Her arrival in February of 1910 with her entourage at a community of 840 souls placed Sarasota in the national spotlight.

For the locals who might not be in the know, socially speaking, The Sarasota Times enthused: “Mrs. Palmer is one of the widest known American women and is almost as well known in London and Paris as her home city, Chicago. She is a beautiful woman and her portrait often appears in periodicals as an example of American beauty.”

Her contributions to Sarasota’s success have been well documented, and are well known.

The rapid transformation of Sarasota is in many ways a testament to the power of 1920s advertising when enticing the rest of the country to come here became a local obsession.
Attracting snowbound northerners to “Spend a Summer this Winter in Sarasota,” as the slogan went, was only half the battle. Inducing them to stay and invest was another challenge.
In many ways, the Florida Land Boom typified the raucous and care-free Jazz Age during which it occurred; Florida’s answer to the California gold rush, the Oklahoma land rush, the Texas oil rush and the Dutch tulip bubble of days gone by.

Gigantic one and two-page ads in the Sarasota-Herald boldly promised happiness and prosperity for those smart and fast enough to buy. “ROMANCE AND RICHES lie hidden today in the dreamy waters of Casey’s Pass. Untold Wealth awaits the investor with vision to see what these sands hold,” promised a typical ad. Agents for Indian Beach Estates sought those who would Share in the Treasure. “Buy now and start a fortune.”
“When Owen Burns tells John Ringling his famous Causeway is completed ... you will see some activity and some PRICE CLIMBING. Let your profits go up with the climb.”
Real estate agent Roger Flory reported that “the cash registers were singing.” As the era’s sage, Will Rogers quipped, “You can’t whip this prosperity thing.”

Beckoning brochures could not do justice to the multi-hued glories of Florida's beauty in black and white images, but this lack was made up for by pulling out all the stops with hyperbole and colorful prose.

The Sunshine State was marketed as, “An Emerald Kingdom by Southern Seas,” while the Sarasota chamber of commerce, trying to snag their share of newcomers pouring into the State promised Sarasota was the “Land of Glorified Opportunity.”
Asa Cassidy painted one of the era’s most colorful symbols, the “Spirit of Sarasota” as a smiling lass in a red bathing suit astride a tarpon, waving happily from the sparkling waters of Sarasota Bay.

Throughout the state rival chambers of commerce competed for newcomers. The St. Petersburg Independent offered a free newspaper on any day the sun did not shine. West Palm Beach, Nature’s Youth Land promised, “The rejuvenating influence of ocean breeze and balmy sunshine makes life worthwhile in the land where flowers grow.”

Tampa produced a cigar box calling card with a picture of a key to the city and assured: “Tampa Police are your friends. We realize that you are not familiar with all our traffic rules. If you violate some minor regulation, just show the traffic officer this KEY TO TAMPA. He will smile pleasantly and wish you a delightful vacation in our land of Sunshine and that will be the extent of his penalty.”

The Sarasota Police Force gave “politeness” lessons to its officers. They were given small cards of welcome to attach to automobiles allowing them to park any place in town for any length of time until they became familiar with our ordinances.
The Florida Development Board gave out a gold cup to the city which sent out the most postcards during the annual Post Card Week drive.

Within the State the hype was pervasive. So laden with advertisements were the Miami newspapers that James A. Cox’s, Miami Daily News swelled to 504 pages in 22 sections and Frank B Shutts’s Miami Herald set the world record for ad space in 1925.

Sarasota was showcased in major northern newspapers, and brochures were mailed out en masse. Each year, the Sarasota Herald began printing an enlarged, multi-section special edition, The Mail It Away Edition, encapsulated everything that was going on throughout Sarasota County.

One of the busiest corners in the world in 1925 was the intersection of Michigan Avenue and 12th Street, the heart of Chicago’s bustling shopping and theater district. And each day thousands of hurried passersby noticed a giant billboard advertising a place called Sarasota.

The chamber of commerce sponsored radio station WJBB, the Voice of the Semi-Tropics. A listener who picked up the station’s signal in Oregon wrote, “Sarasota seems to be a live city and will derive great benefit from your programs.”

An advantage Sarasota enjoyed over any other Florida community was the national advertising campaign by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus which placed 48”x28” posters of “Sarasota by the Sea, Florida’s Most Beautiful City” on billboards wherever the circus traveled. Sarasota was also advertised in circus programs.

The flowery prose and pie-in-the-sky promises helped the population soar from 2,940 in 1920 to 8,248 by 1925. Then came the crash: From 1926 to 1930, Sarasota grew by only 114 people.
But the Sarasota, born during those frenetic years was a beautiful county that endured and prospered long after the storied land boom collapsed and died.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/business/real-estate/2020/10/11/jeff-lahurd-early-ad-blitz-1920-s-spurred-sarasota-growth/3637783001/