Golf Comes to Florida - Colonel J. Hamilton Gillespie

[Images Left to Right: John Hamilton Gillespie practicing his golf swing - c1896 and the Sarasota Golf Clubhouse - c1905]

Early golf enthusiasts in Sarasota insist that the first golf ball ever put into play in the United States was on a small practice course on Sarasota’s Main Street in 1886. Colonel John Hamilton Gillespie, Sarasota’s number one citizen for over three decades, designed and built the course in a small, natural clearing close to where Sarasota’s Central School now stands. Born in 1852 in Edinburgh, Scotland, John Hamilton Gillespie moved to Sarasota in 1886 to oversee his father’s investment business. The Florida Mortgage and Investment Company acquired land for British and European émigrés who were drawn by alluring descriptions of economic opportunity. A colony of the company’s Scottish investors was struggling to survive in the Sarasota wilderness of the 1880s, so Gillespie’s father sent him to salvage the effort. Gillespie brought his golf clubs from Scotland and built a tee in his back yard between his home on Palm Avenue and what is now the U.S. Post Office on Ringling Boulevard. He would tee off, and his caddy would return the ball to him. In May of 1886 Gillespie cleared land for a two-hole golf course behind his house. The creation of Gillespie’s course, which consisted of two greens and a fairway, is the foundation of Sarasota’s claim as home to the first golf course in the United States. He was indisputably one of America’s golf pioneers. Golf wasn’t just a hobby for Gillespie; it was his passion. A May 1886 diary entry by Sarasota colonist Alex Browning, notes, “I used to stop on my way to work and watch Colonel Gillespie play golf. One day he asked me if I ever played golf, and when I said ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Mon, y’re missin’ half ye life,’.” Gillespie’s downtown practice course soon grew to four holes, and after the arrival in 1900 of Leonard Reid, his manservant and friend, the two men built one of Florida’s earliest nine-hole courses. In a 1952 newspaper interview, Reid recalled the day in 1901 that Gillespie proposed building the course, “We walked for miles through the palmettos, with Colonel Gillespie sketching the golf holes on a map. A few weeks later, about 50 men grubbed out the palmettos for the fairways,” he said.

Gillespie designed his course for a 110-acre tract of land. The course and clubhouse were completed in 1905. Gillespie maintained the nine-hole golf course at his own expense for five years but sold it in 1910. In Edinburgh, Gillespie had lived as an upper-class gentleman, a lifestyle he maintained in frontier Sarasota. He imported his whiskey from Scotland. He had an extensive library, which became the nucleus of the Sarasota Library, and he was active in organizing the Sarasota Yacht and Gun Club. He wrote for New York Golf and !e Golfer’s Magazine under the pen name of “The Colonel,” the title which he was known by in Sarasota. In Scotland, he was a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews, and in later years went every summer to play on the links that he had known as a young man. John Hamilton Gillespie died at his Sarasota home, “Golf Hall,” on September 7, 1923. He collapsed from a heart attack while on the links in front of his house. A day of mourning was declared, and Gillespie was buried in the cemetery he had given to the town.