The Royal Park development was created by Waldo Sexton and Arthur McKee, and its nine-hole golf course became the Vero Beach Golf & Country Club. Here an unknown golfer demonstrates the proper technique for driving the ball (circa 1930).
When Colonel J. Hamilton Gillespie, a Scottish immigrant in Sarasota, built a two-hole single fairway golf course on the front lawn of his home in 1886, few Floridians could envision a time when there would be more than 1,500 golf courses in the Sunshine State – and a demand for even more. The small course, extremely modest by European standards, gave the colonel an opportunity to practice the game he had learned as a youth.
His pursuit of the game was a solitary one initially, since there were fewer than a dozen golfers in the whole of the United States and no other ones in Florida. Within a few months, however, Gillespie had converted several of his neighbors into golf fanatics. Within a couple of years, these new converts decided that a longer, more challenging course was needed and a nine-hole course was constructed.
Gillespie was the sole owner of the new course until it was sold to the Sarasota Golf Holding Co. in 1910.
Read the entire article in the March 2009 issue
True Tails is a series written by Amy Robinson for Vero Beach’s dog lovers. Ask Amy about your dog’s behavior by clicking below.
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