John Hamilton Gillespie 1852 - 1923

The Father of Sarasota

John Hamilton Gillespie & Sarasota History

“The Father of Sarasota”, John Hamilton Gillespie, was born October 14, 1852 in Edinburgh, Scotland, twenty years before fellow Scot Donald Ross.

Educated at Edinburgh Academy and University of St Andrews, John Hamilton Gillespie was admitted to the highest legal body in Scotland, The Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet in 1875. He was a member of the ceremonial Royal Company of Archers serving as the Sovereign’s Bodyguard in Scotland, and was captain in the Midlothian Coast Artillery Volunteers.

John Hamilton Gillespie arrived in Sarasota in 1886 from colonial service in Australia, to assist the failing Florida Mortgage and Investment Company, a development company partially owned by his father in Edinburgh. The company had enticed a group of Scottish colonists to Sarasota in 1885 to help settle its 50,000-acre holdings, including most of the land constituting the present City of Sarasota.

The settlers arrived to find most of the company's promises unfulfilled. John Hamilton Gillespie was dispatched to improve the situation. Many disillusioned colonists left, however, and the company entered liquidation proceedings. John Hamilton Gillespie remained in Sarasota after the court appointed him to manage the assets of the company there.

John Hamilton Gillespie organized the clearing of three miles of Main Street, the building of a substantial wharf on the waterfront, and the beginning of a 40-acre experimental farm.

Having become a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1896, he joined the American and Florida Bar Associations and served as president of the local Bar Association.

In 1902, John Hamilton Gillespie was elected the first mayor of Sarasota when the town was incorporated on the date of Gillespie’s fiftieth birthday, and he held this office for six terms. He also served his community as Justice of Peace four years and Notary Public ten years.

He was influential in building an Episcopal church in Sarasota and was founder of The Church of the Redeemer, and served as chaplain to Sarasota Bay Post #30 of the American Legion. As a Mason, he reached the Order of Knight Templar, was affiliated with the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows and became a charter member of the Kiwanis Club.

He was affectionately known as “Colonel” in the city he fathered.

John Hamilton Gillespie volunteered in World War I for duty in Scotland’s Volunteer Force as Cadet Captain. Because of this service to Scotland, he lost his United States citizenship. An act of Congress restored it after the war.

John Hamilton Gillespie died on his golf course near his home September 7, 1923, and is buried in historic Rosemary Cemetery. His course was sold in 1924 for development and no trace remains today.  

The John Hamilton Gillespie Historic Marker was dedicated in 1995 by the Sarasota County Historical Commission on the site of the golf course he built.

It is John Hamilton Gillespie's stewardship of the City of Sarasota and of Golf in Sarasota, his place in golf history in Florida and in America, and his continued relevance today that we celebrate in the JOHN HAMILTON GILLESPIE INITIATIVE.

John Hamilton Gillespie & Golf History

The game of golf was born in Florida when John Hamilton Gillespie arrived in Sarasota from Edinburgh in 1886.

Golf came with John Hamilton Gillespie from his home’s earliest ancestral memory. Authenticating the record is evidence found in the Account Book of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston that golf was played on Musselburgh Links in Edinburgh as early as 1672, although Mary Queen of Scots reputedly played at Musselburgh in 1567.  

Among Foulis’ entries, this passage, compiled and documented by John Kerr in “The Golf Book of East Lothian”, is written “2 March 1672 - For 3 golfe balls 0 152 0. Lost at golfe at Musselburgh wt Gosfoord, Lyon etc, 3 05 0. For a horse htyre thither, 0 18 0.” 

John Hamilton Gillespie came from Edinburgh, the capital city situated on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian. His home was also home to golf’s Royal Burgess Golfing Society, its motto “Far and Sure” founded 1735 and the oldest golfing society in the world; Bruntsfield Links Golfing Society of 1761, the fourth oldest in the world; to Musselburgh Links, The Old Course and host of The Open Championship six times from 1874 to 1889. His home would also become home to the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, when Old Tom Morris laid out Muirfield in 1891.

Writing in The American Golfer magazine, Gillespie reminisces about his youthful golfing days with Young Tom Morris on The Old Course at St Andrews.

And his new home, Sarasota, would become Florida's “cradle of golf.”

Nobody in the small village of Sarasota knew what John Hamilton Gillespie was doing when, in May of 1886, he built a practice course consisting of two greens connected by a fairway. 

In 1904, John Hamilton Gillespie laid out a nine-hole golf course on 110 acres east of his original course. This new course was located on present-day Main Street, east of present Links Avenue, where Gillespie practiced daily for many years. In 1905 he added a clubhouse that he maintained with the course at his own expense until he sold the course to Owen Burns in 1910. 

John Hamilton Gillespie continued to help support and take care of the course because upkeep could be quite an undertaking. Then Gillespie came up with the idea of organizing a golf club to help with expenses.

On December 13, 1913, a meeting was held at the Sarasota Yacht and Automobile Club to organize the Sarasota Golf Club. Gillespie stated that maintaining a golf course without support from residents, as well as visitors, is difficult. The group agreed to pay $10 per person ($236 today) to become Charter Members; the money would go toward upkeep of the course. The course’s owner, Owen Burns, would allow members to play for free, with the use of the clubhouse, as long as they made necessary repairs to the windmill and lavatories in the clubhouse.

The first members of Sarasota Golf Club read like a who’s who of prominent early Sarasotans: early politicians Hugh Browning, Harry Higel and, of course, John Hamilton Gillespie; physicians Jack and Joseph Halton; landowners Owen Burns, Ralph Caples, Honore Palmer and J.H. Lord. The club drew up by-laws for the organization and rules for playing golf on the course. To play golf for the winter season cost $10. For those who did not want to commit to an entire season, the fee structure was $5 for one month, $2 for one week and 50 cents for a day. Although Gillespie encouraged everyone to play, the course was rarely crowded.

Over the years, John Hamilton Gillespie was commissioned by railroad, steamship and hotel magnate Henry Bradley Plant to design and build six other Florida courses and one in Havana, Cuba. He managed Florida’s early professional golf tour, and was published as an authority on the sport. 

John Hamilton Gillespie never stopped in his campaign to promote the game of golf. In a 1921 newspaper article, he wrote about how golf barely existed in the state at the turn of the 20th century. He said “there was no East Coast golf in Florida then, the Jacksonville Country Club being in its infancy, and, to the credit for making golf well and favorably known in Florida and in the southern state. Tampa for a long time did not take to the game, although Mr. Plant spent considerable money on an endeavor to foster the game. It was not until Bellaire became famous as a [Donald Ross designed] golf course that Tampa woke up and took notice.”

In the December 16, 1922 issue of Editor Grantland Rice’s The American Golfer - The Sport Pictorial magazine, author Harry C. Green profiled Gillespie in the feature story “He Built a Town to get a Golf Game”.

In the issue following Gillespie’s death, on September 22, 1923, The American Golfer wrote, “Golf in this country lost one of its real pioneers a short time since in the death of Colonel J. Hamilton Gillespie of Sarasota, Florida. Some thirty eight years ago, Colonel Gillespie, then a young Scotch barrister from Dumfrieshire, landed in Florida as manager for a syndicate that controlled several thousand acres in the vicinity of what is now Sarasota.

He had played golf at home in his boyhood and he brought along a supply of balls and a few clubs. One of the first things he did after getting settles into his new surroundings was to provide a space for three improvised hole of golf.

This modest layout was without doubt one of the first in the land, though of course this early beginning was hardly a golf club.

Ever since then Colonel Gillespie had maintained a close touch with golf, and it is a rather significant fact that the end came as he stood on a tee of the Sarasota Golf Club with a driver in his hand, a golfer unto the end.”

Although John Hamilton Gillespie knew that the game would grow in popularity, it was not until the Florida Land Boom of the mid-1920s that it became a popular sport, with two new courses built in Sarasota during the boom.

It is John Hamilton Gillespie's stewardship of the City of Sarasota and of Golf in Sarasota, his place in golf history in Florida and in America, and his continued relevance today that we celebrate in the JOHN HAMILTON GILLESPIE INITIATIVE.

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