PBSCV1599
Gen. James Patton Anderson Camp 1599
Celebrating 32 Years 1992 - 2024
COLLIER COUNTY
Barron Gift Collier (March 23, 1873 – March 13, 1939) was an American advertising entrepreneur who became the largest landowner and developer in the U.S. state of Florida, as well as the owner of a chain of hotels, bus lines, several banks, and newspapers. He also owned a telephone company and a steamship line.
Collier was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He quit school at age sixteen to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. Within four years, he started his own business, the Consolidated Street Railway Advertising Company of New York City. By age twenty-six, he was already worth a million dollars.
Collier married in 1907 to Juliet Gordon Carnes, also a native of Memphis. In 1911, the Colliers visited Fort Myers, Florida, on vacation, and fell in love with the area. They bought nearby Useppa Island for the sum of $100,000. (The island was reputed to be the place where the Spanish pirate Jose Gaspar had held one of his favorite female captives named Useppa a century earlier, hence the name.)
Collier was an avid fisherman and established the Izaak Walton Club at their Useppa Island resort. Named for the seventeenth century author of The Compleat Angler, it became one of the most exclusive sporting clubs in the world. Collier next developed golf courses and improved a hunting club, the Rod and Gun Club, in Everglades City, Florida, that also attracted wealthy tourists. Over the next decade, the Colliers went on to acquire more than a million acres (4000 km²) of land in Southwest Florida, making them the largest private land owners in the state. He invested millions of dollars to transform and develop the wilderness, including drainage of the Everglades and construction of the Tamiami Trail. For his influence and investment in the state's future, the Florida legislature named the newly created Collier County in his honor on May 8, 1923.
Barron Collier's tremendous energy was manifest in other areas. He was involved in the national Boy Scout movement. In New York he served as special deputy commissioner for public safety, and introduced the use of white and yellow traffic divider lines on highways. Following the Lindbergh kidnapping in March 1932, he was an influential figure persuading the U.S. government to join INTERPOL in 1938.[1] Interpol originally had been formed in 1923.[2] He was decorated by nine foreign governments.[3]
His wife, Juliet Carnes Collier, appeared on the cover of the U.S. edition of the Tatler, the Tatler and American Sketch, in the early 1930s.
Collier died March 13, 1939, in Manhattan, survived by his wife and three sons, Barron Jr., Miles, and Samuel, and was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.[4] Although the Great Depression had strained his finances and slowed development of their Florida lands, the next generations of his family would continue his development work in subsequent decades.
The family members participated in many sports, including motorsports, and especially road racing, which led to the sons Miles and Sam founding the Automobile Racing Club of America in 1933, which became the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) in 1944. Miles, Cameron Argetsinger, and Briggs Cunningham were instrumental in founding Watkins Glen near one of their summer retreats. Juliet worried about the risks of racing and tried to influence her sons against it. However, Sam died in a racing accident. The renowned automobile collection of Briggs Cunningham was purchased by a member of the Collier family and is now part of the Revs Institute for Automotive Research in Naples, Florida and is open to the public.[5] The Collier County Public School System named Barron Collier High School in honor of Barron Gift Collier, Sr.
The Collier Family Chronicles
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Colorful tales of the characters, how they built their empire and the way they got the county named for them.
BY MICHAEL KORB
You’d think we’d know them pretty well by now. After all, their name is on a few hundred thousand license plates in Southwest Florida thanks to the family patriarch.
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And yet the Collier family (and its various branches) remains a relative mystery to area residents. There’s no denying that when you combine wealth, history and an air of mystery, there’s room for wild speculation about a clan that draws a great deal of its power directly from one of America’s great visionaries.
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“They’re very quiet,” says Mike Reagen, former president and CEO of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce. “They’re not out front that much and they don’t want to be. … This is a very private family.”
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For more than 100 years, the family has had a hand in shaping, quite literally, Southwest Florida. Under the leadership of Barron Gift Collier (the advertising magnate who counted everyone from J.P. Morgan to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as close personal friends), the family once owned more than one million acres of our region. Today, his descendants’ holdings and their respective companies have grown to include everything from oil production and agriculture to mineral management and real estate development. It’s safe to say that, in a fairly microcosmic sense, they are everywhere. And sometimes, not where you’d expect.
Of course, wealthy multi-generational families are not a new phenomenon, nor are they particularly noteworthy. They can be found in virtually every county of every state, often credited with making marks and leaving legacies. But rarely have they continued to thrive like the Colliers. They’ve taken a large, but rough, diamond and continued to polish it into a shining example of interest—one that Forbes magazine said was worth $1.6 billion in 1998. Granted, fortunes have been won and lost many times over since that point in time, but we don’t expect them to be bouncing checks any time soon. In fact, the Miles Collier family’s Private Capital Management firm sold in 2001 for nearly $1.4 billion. Today, the family can cite the likes of Grey Oaks, Ave Maria, La Playa Beach Club & Resort, The Isles of Collier Preserve and Hamilton Harbor Yacht Club as just a sliver of their many modern contributions to the Southwest Florida landscape. They’ve donated 74.6 square miles for everything from Collier Seminole State Park to the Everglades National Park.
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And just as their business sense can be traced back to Barron Collier’s powerful skill set, so, too, do they share his love of this place and his understanding that what’s good for Southwest Florida is also good for the Colliers. But while the family’s history has included more triumph than tragedy, it has seen tragedy nonetheless. It’s also included everything from alleged spies and auto racing champions to deep-pocket political maneuvering. Ahh, family.
THE BEGINNING
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Most are probably aware of Barron Gift Collier’s road to fortune. He was born on March 23, 1873, in Memphis, Tenn., the son of Colonel Cowles Myles Collier of Hampton, Va., a member of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The family’s well-being went the way of the South and though hardly poor, young Barron left school at 16 to begin working.
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His first job was to solicit freight for the Illinois Central Railroad. And he blossomed. But even at that young age, his business acumen told him that real wealth came with ownership. And so when he heard of the invention of gas streetlights, he convinced the City of Memphis to give him the contract. That venture’s success allowed him just enough capital to buy another local business: a printing plant. Its purchase would be a fateful decision: One of the plant’s less profitable contracts was with a company that sold advertising cards for the horse-drawn street cars.
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Proving a well-read visionary, he knew that electric streetcars were on the horizon. And so they were. A talented salesman, he soon got the exclusive right for all streetcar advertising in Memphis. Before long, he had worked his magic in the Southern cities of Little Rock, Ark., and New Orleans and sold franchises in many others. But, according to a WGCU-produced program about the county’s namesake, he once told a reporter, “You cannot catch big fish in a bucket … you have to go where the big fish are.” And so he moved his business to New York City and Consolidated Street Railway Advertising Company was born.
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It’s not a particularly catchy name to modern ears, but Collier’s tenacity led the company to the top of the mass transit advertising market, eventually having more than 70 satellite offices from New York to San Francisco, Canada to Cuba. By the age of 26, he had amassed more than $1 million.
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His business interests continued to thrive and in 1907, at the age of 34, he married the lovely Juliet Gordon Carnes, a well-heeled Memphis woman 11 years his junior. Their first child, Barron Gift Collier Jr., was born five months later. Two more boys, Samuel and Cowles “Miles,” would quickly follow.
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It was around this time that Collier would visit Southwest Florida for the first time, via invitation of Chicago businessman John Roach, who built a hotel on his island, Useppa. Collier bought the island in 1911 for $100,000 (his personal income was then an estimated $5 million a year), beginning a love affair with Florida’s climate, landscape and acreage that would continue for the rest of his life. Over the next decade he would accumulate a total of 1.3 million acres in what is now Lee, Collier and Hendry counties. (Surprisingly, those acres did not include Naples proper or Marco Island.)
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All the while he was friends with some of the most formidable names of the era: William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Coleman DuPont, William Wrigley and others. He owned the newspapers that would become the Fort Myers News-Press and the Naples Daily News. His Collier West Coast Motor Lines later became Trailways.
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Back in New York, he was named special deputy commissioner for public safety, and his ingenuity and advertising sense led to the public safety campaign of Aunty J. Walker. (Get it?) Virtually overnight, jaywalking deaths were cut in half. Perhaps most impressive of all, Collier came up with the concept of the white and yellow painted road divider lines we use today. He owned one of the world’s first amusement parks, Luna Park in Coney Island. He is also credited with the concept of Interpol and played a major role in building the Boy Scouts of America. He even helped make Tallulah Bankhead a star. He owned a spectacular villa in Baden Baden, Germany, that was later expropriated by Adolf Hitler.
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Now, as you might have guessed, the county wasn’t named “Collier” when he got here. As Florida’s largest landowner and one of America’s most respected businessmen, Collier found himself in a unique position. The state had run out of funds during the construction of the first highway connecting Tampa with Miami (the Tamiami Trail). Collier pledged to finish the roadway at his own expense if the legislature would rename the lower portion of Lee County, which was then the largest county east of the Mississippi River.
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Though the renaming in 1923 didn’t sit particularly well with old-timers, there was no denying that completion of the Tamiami Trail was a huge economic boon for the area.
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“In 1923, Barron Collier was perceived as the devil incarnate according to the people in Lee County because he scooped out land that they weren’t prepared to give up,” says local historian Lois Bolin. “But he was a businessman, he had a vision, and he saw things way beyond what other people could see.”
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But paying for the Trail was a drain on Collier’s finances. And the Great Depression dried up revenue from his advertising business and, with no cash flow, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Luckily (for him and his heirs), changes to the bankruptcy laws allowed him to keep a significant amount of his Florida holdings.
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Unfortunately, by that point the stresses of the situation were taking their toll on him physically. He died in 1939 at the age of 66.
THE BRANCHES
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Not surprisingly, the three Collier sons were chips off the old block. Good-looking and charming, they were raised in New York, attended Yale and traveled in the best circles. And, like their father, they had an appreciation for transportation. When they were young, their individual chauffeurs (yes, that’s how they rolled) made them small race cars with lawnmower and motorcycle engines.
Racing became so much a part of their lives that years later the brothers created the Automobile Racing Club of America, which became the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). In fact, Samuel helped found the world-famous Watkins Glen International speedway. But the good fortune of the Colliers, who had already taken a serious beating during the Great Depression, came crashing down when Samuel was killed when his Ferrari 166 left the road while leading the 1950 Watkins Glen Grand Prix. He was the first racing death at The Glen. His restored car now sits in The Collier Collection, a world-class auto collection belonging to Miles C. Collier, primary of Collier Enterprises.
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“For his part, (Cowles) Miles led a fascinating life,” says Lamar Gable, the step-son of Barron Collier Jr. and former chairman of the board of the Barron Collier Companies. “He was a spy for the O.S.S. during World War II. The story goes that he was captured by the Nazis, but his French was so good that they had no idea he was American” and eventually let him go. It would seem his life was charmed. But in 1954, at the age of 40, just four years after Sam’s death, Miles contracted a rare form of polio.
“He mentioned to my step-dad (Barron Jr.) that he felt ill in the morning and was dead by evening,” Gable says.
When Barron Sr. passed away, the three sons agreed to a buyout agreement so that if something were to happen to one of the brothers, the other two would buy out his heirs to keep the company with the two surviving Collier brothers. But it turns out getting the cash to buy out a third of an empire was no small feat, and so when Miles died, the family decided to continue operating with his widow taking his position. It changed the dynamic for everyone.
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“What happened was my father was the financial arm of the three Collier brothers,” says Judy (Collier) Sproul. “Sam and Miles were down here, but he worked out of New York, so we lived up in Connecticut. And then when Sam was killed in Watkins Glen, we moved to Florida—to Palm Beach—because my mother didn’t want to live in Everglades City.”
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Barron Collier Jr. had two daughters (Judy and Barbara) with his first wife, Barbara, before divorcing her and marrying again.
“My father remarried and that’s where the Gables came in,” says Sproul. “He acquired four step-children (including Lamar). Then they had Barry (Barron Collier III), my half-brother.”
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The branches become a bit more tangled at this point, but the joining of the families was smoother than many would have predicted.
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“One thing my father did was try to meld the family,” Sproul says. “He took us all to Hong Kong (in 1974); everybody. Of course, I was the oldest, and by that time I had lost my husband and had three young children of my own; three girls. And I had just moved to Florida. It was a very interesting experience with me in my mid-30s down to Barry who was a very young kid. It really gave us a nice basis to look back on to reminisce about and what not. Because we had very different lives, particularly me being up North and married and having children.”
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The last of the three Collier sons, Barron Collier Jr., died in 1976, leaving two widows, Isabel Collier Reid and Marguerite Collier, at the family helm.
THE SPLIT
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According to the same 1998 story in Forbes that stated the family was worth $1.6 billion, when the family heirs disagreed about investment strategies in 1980, they decided to split the empire with a coin toss.
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And while that’s not exactly how things went down, it’s certainly true the remaining two branches of the family decided to separate their holdings. One branch, led by Miles Collier, of the third generation, became Collier Enterprises; the other side, Barron Collier Companies, was led by three other heirs, including the Sproul and Gable families.
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“(The business) was basically a series of trusts and partnerships that held the Florida land and businesses,” Lamar Gable says. “So that was like an umbrella organization of which the Barron Collier Jr. side of the family had 50 percent and the Miles Collier side had 50 percent. When Miles and I were basically young guys in the office, the organization was still run by the same people that had run it since prior to World War II. So there was feeling that maybe we wanted to go and do our own thing. So rather than getting into a row over it, we said, ‘Why don’t we partition the company? You take your half of assets and go do what you want to do and we take our half of the assets and go and do what we want to do.’”
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After a great deal of math, the company’s holdings were divided into equal-value packets, basically 24 large envelopes divided into red and green, Gable says. Some would have office buildings and gas stations; others would have rights for different things and ranch lands. If one envelope came up short, cash was added to make it equal.
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“It was a blind draw,” Gable says. “Mrs. Collier and Mrs. Reid (Miles’ widow) alternated drawing. You didn’t know what you were going to get. … At the end of the day, Miles and I were laughing—neither one of us could figure out if anybody got a better deal.”
TODAY
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The two camps, though cordial, don’t seem to mingle past related business affairs, of which there remain many. Collier Enterprises has basically gone radio dark since Parker Collier was found to have been the major donor for the political advocacy group Revere America back in 2010. The organization spent approximately $2.5 million on attack ads in the Northeast in an attempt to stop candidates thought to support the Affordable Care Act. It drew nationwide attention and seemed to align the family with equally mysterious families such as the Koch brothers.
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But while Collier Enterprises tends to keep a lower profile, it still plays a major role in area development with projects such as The Isles of Collier Preserve (formerly Sabal Bay), the Town of Big Cypress and Collier’s Reserve. There are no family members participating in its day-to-day operations.
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In fact, rather surprisingly, of the 19 members of the Collier family’s fourth generation, only two are a part of Barron Collier Companies’ day-to-day operations. Katie Sproul runs the agriculture division, which grows and distributes everything from cattle to sod (she also oversees the Halstatt Real Estate Fund, which is a Sproul family business separate from Barron Collier Companies, responsible for Grey Oaks, LaPlaya and Mercato), and Blake Gable handles the real estate division as well as its gas and oil operations in Southwest Florida. The rest of the clan is scattered across the United States and merely hold positions on the boards of directors of the various companies. Family reunions and board meetings tend to be one and the same.
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And as Florida has rebounded from the economic recession of the last decade, the Colliers are mindful of the future. The Barron Collier Companies set up a family internship program where any interested family members can come and be exposed to the businesses.
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“At the end of three months they are probably more confused than when they got here because it’s a lot to understand, but it’s a great opportunity for them,” Blake says. “I love it because it gives Katie and I and my cousin, Jennifer (Sproul), who lives here, the opportunity to see some of our cousins who we don’t get to see as regularly for an extended period of time.”
And as the family continues to grow (there are currently 19 members of the fifth generation—the oldest being 13), the Collier businesses keep spreading outward. One of the youngest members of the fourth generation, 22-year-old Lara Collier (daughter of Barron Collier III), started Collier Family Farms, an organic farm out in Ave Maria that features not only a farmers market but also a U-pick option.
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“We have started a handful of businesses in the last few years,” Blake says. “Everything from an environmental services group to a fledging engineering group—both of which are profitable. We have an insurance company; a small, little title insurance group that we saw an opportunity to have a profitable business, and the family said, ‘Go for it.’
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“I think that’s why we are in so many businesses: The family doesn’t say, ‘Stick to real estate and agriculture and oil.’ If you find an opportunity to grow the business, we are going to give you the latitude to do it.
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“It’s true, that whatever is good for Southwest Florida, in some way shape or form is good for us. This is where a lot of the family grew up; they spent a tremendous amount of time here. And as they move through life, this was the one thing that was always constant.”
Barron Collier's three sons (left to right): Samuel, Miles and Barron Jr. seated with Graham Copeland, second from right, the engineer tasked with completing the Tamiami Trail.
COWLES MILES COLLIER
BARRON G. COLLIER'S FATHER
Cowles Miles Collier
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Birth: Sep. 10, 1838
Hampton
Hampton City
Virginia, USA
Death: Sep. 14, 1907
Gloucester
Essex County
Massachusetts, USA
Cowles Miles (Myles) Collier was born to Charles Miles Collier, Jr. (1808-48) and Sara Ann Cowles (b. 1815) in Hampton, Virginia in 1836. He attended a military school in Virginia, and after graduation attended West Point, only to resign some months later. Upon returning to Virginia he was appointed to serve with the United States Navy, and served under Captain Samuel Barron on the USS Wabash from 1858 to 1859. Later his service in the Navy took him to foreign waters, mainly in the Mediterranean, visiting Egypt, Greece, Turkey, North Africa, Spain and Portugal. After returning to the United States, he served under service of Charles M. Fauntleroy.
When Virginia seceded from the Union, he resigned from the Union Navy, returned to Virginia and applied to Governor John Letcher for a position in the Confederate Navy. He was appointed First Lieutenant and ordered to report for duty at Fort Rappahannock. There he reunited with Fauntleroy, who requested his service under General Joseph F. Johnston's artillery in protecting Harper's Ferry. While serving under Johnston he gained a great knowledge of artillery and weaponry, and was asked by the Confederate Government to oversee the Arsenal in Augusta, which housed the largest plant for the manufacture of gunpowder in the Confederate States at the time.
In addition to a sailor and soldier, he was an artist and painter. He mainly painted watercolors of nautical scenes and sailors. His works were shown at multiple exhibitions during his later life. In 1863 he married Hannah Celeste Shackleford(1841-1913), daughter of James Shackelford (1786-1866) and Hariette Cowdrey (1800-67) of South Carolina.
They had four children: Barron Gift Collier, Charles Miles Collier, Euphan Marshall Collier and Georgia Shackleford Collier, who married Edward Trippe Comer. In later life Collier and his wife relocated to New York City, where Collier was considered to be an artist of note. Mrs. Collier was involved in the local Revolutionary War descendant societies. Collier died in September, 1908.
Family links:
Parents:
Sarah Ann Cowles Collier (1815 - 1904)
Spouse:
Hannah Celeste Shackelford Collier (1843 - 1913)*
Children:
Charles Miles Collier (1866 - 1941)*
Georgia Shackleford Collier Comer (1868 - 1948)*
Euphan Marshall Collier Stewart (1869 - 1942)*
Barron Gift Collier (1873 - 1939)*
Siblings:
James Marshall Collier (1838 - 1911)*
Cowles Miles Collier (1838 - 1907)
William Allen Collier (1838 - 1922)*
Charles Henry Collier (1841 - 1923)*