The Failed Scottish Colony and the Man Who Stayed

In the winter of eighteen eighty-five, nearly sixty Scottish families arrived at Sarasota Bay expecting a promised paradise. The Florida Mortgage and Investment Company of Edinburgh had sold them on a vision of Little Scotland in the subtropics, fertile land, warm winters, a fresh start. What they found instead was a mosquito-ridden frontier village with almost nothing built, no comfortable lodging, no reliable food supply, and no support. Within months, most of the colonists had scattered or sailed back home.

But one man who came the following year, sent to rescue the company's failing investment, fell in love with the place instead. John Hamilton Gillespie, an Edinburgh lawyer and passionate golfer, arrived in eighteen eighty-six. He set about building real infrastructure. He constructed the De Soto Hotel, established steamship connections to Tampa, and dredged channels so that commerce could actually move. Then he did something that would ripple far beyond Florida.

Behind his home, Gillespie laid out what is generally described as the first golf course in Florida and one of the first in the United States, two greens and a long fairway cut from the Florida scrub in eighteen eighty-six, two full years before the famous Apple Tree Gang founded the Saint Andrews Club in Yonkers, New York. Later, in nineteen oh five, he built a full nine-hole course on what is now Links Avenue in downtown Sarasota. The Florida Historic Golf Trail and golf historians still debate the precise title of first, and Gillespie's course is usually ranked among the earliest in the country.

He became Sarasota's first mayor when the town incorporated in nineteen oh two. Gillespie Park, the quiet neighborhood north of downtown bearing his name, is the most visible monument to the Scotsman who arrived for business and ended up giving a small Florida settlement its civic bones.