How Scientology Came to Clearwater

In downtown Clearwater stands the Fort Harrison Hotel, a stately building that opened in nineteen twenty-six as the city's grand social center. Its story took a remarkable turn in the mid nineteen seventies. In October of nineteen seventy-five, a group calling itself United Churches of Florida quietly bought the Fort Harrison Hotel for cash.

Nervous locals were assured it was a benign interfaith organization. It was not. United Churches of Florida was a front, and the true buyer was the Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction writer L.

Ron Hubbard. The church had been searching in secret for a city to serve as its worldwide spiritual headquarters, and it had chosen Clearwater. The internal code name for the operation, later revealed in seized documents, borrowed the language of war.

When the truth came out, reported by the Saint Petersburg Times, it set off decades of tension between the church and the town. The Fort Harrison became the centerpiece of what Scientologists call the Flag Land Base, the church's most important religious retreat, where members travel from around the world for advanced training. Over the years that followed, the church acquired a great deal of downtown Clearwater property.

Whatever one makes of it, the fact is plain. This small Gulf Coast city became, and remains, the earthly capital of one of the most talked-about religious movements in America.