BAILEY HOMESTEAD PRESERVE
VISITING THE MERCHANT'S LEGACY, WANDERING MEMORY LANE
More than a century after it was built, and a couple of years after the owner’s son, Francis Bailey, wrote his recollections of time
“Daddy [Frank Bailey] and Uncle Ernest each owned half of the homestead and there was never any mortgage on the house. That was one thing Daddy didn’t believe in, mortgaging his home.” ― Francis Bailey, quoted in his memoir My 92 Years on Sanibel: Remembering My Family and My Island
spent living there―and of a less-cluttered Sanibel―the Bailey Homestead Preserve, the house and surrounding 28.3 acres, today is a healthy keepsake in the comparatively long history of the island. The refurbished homestead pairs well with other important buildings clustered down the road at the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village, where Frank Bailey’s general store is located and is open to public viewing, original transaction ledgers and correspondence on a desk in the wooden building’s corner office.
The Bailey Homestead Preserve along Periwinkle Way also allows us to inspect the private side of a significant business family on Sanibel, which at that time was a farming hamlet when Frank Bailey arrived from Kentucky in 1894. Viewing Frank Bailey through the prism of black-and-white photos, he seems a bit inflexible, in a business suit working his garden or posing for pictures with his children. But the reality was that Frank Bailey was astute and quite passionate, caring deeply about his adopted hometown, a young man hauling watermelons by horse and wagon for shipping to Fort Myers, later running a packing company, providing a telephone and telegraph services, opening a general grocery store that
still serves Sanibel and Captiva. “If there were little niches to fill,” says Kristie Anders, education director for the SanibelCaptiva Conservation Foundation, or SCCF, the nonprofit that took guardianship of the homestead preserve in 2011, “Frank Bailey was there. He was quite an interesting man.”
Visitors today at the Bailey Homestead Preserve find grounds not that different from when Frank Bailey lived there, eventually raising three boys alone after his wife, Annie Mead Matthews, died prematurely. Though the original house was smaller, what’s there today is freshly painted in green, and there are some artifacts of the generations that had lived in the home. Outside, there are skeletal remains of an ancient windmill to draw water, bees and butterflies everywhere, a gift shop and native plant nursery for those eager to absorb Southwest Florida’s subtropical culture, all of which is possible because of the generosity and determination of a guardianship group celebrating 50 years on Sanibel in 2017. (Check the website for tour times.)
Of the Bailey Homestead Preserve’s 28.3 acres, 19.3 acres were set aside as natural settings when the property was sold by the Baileys in 2011 to SCCF for about $4 million. SCCF solicited donations to purchase and renovate the property, opening it, the native plant nursery and gift shop to the public last year. SCCF manages some 2,000 acres of Sanibel’s natural resources and undeveloped land, including the Bailey Homestead Preserve. Sanibel is about two-thirds undeveloped, the outfall of planning when Sanibel became a city in 1974.
However, purchasing the Bailey Homestead Preserve was a first for SCCF, Anders explains, because it included the home. She says the decision became much easier when aerial photos showed the property linked other parcels that would create a wildlife corridor, keeping animals safer. SCCF “doesn’t normally buy land with a home,” Anders adds. “But lowering [potential home] density and completing the corridor was an opportunity that we really couldn’t pass up.”
Melinda Brooks rode her bicycle to the Bailey Homestead Preserve for a tour. She had been living on Sanibel for 15 years, always wondering about the large home viewed through seagrape leaves, she says, waiting for the docent at the Shipley Trail and Gateway Kiosk leading to the grounds. She and others would spend two hours studying the grounds, the immaculate home of handblown windows and hard-pine floors where Sanibel’s leading merchant once roamed, and where his children raised their children. “I learned so much,” Brooks says after the tour. “For some reason, [it] was kind of a secret.”
The Bailey Homestead Preserve “is one of the very special things about the island,” notes Dee Serage-Century, an SCCF docent and native plant expert, during a trek around the property. The homestead was in part purchased to avert private construction, the land platted for some 36 new homes, she explains. The property along Periwinkle, she says, “was not on our checklist, but it came our way. And this community rose to the occasion,” in fact raising $6 million in donations, the added $2 million for refurbishments and maintenance, she adds. SCCF administrators had announced the return of donations should the $4 million goal fall short.
The Bailey house has been listed as a historic landmark,
“I think about what it was like for them is how they wore those stiff collars and heavy coats! Women looked like they were clothed for the North Pole even when they went swimming. Men would go fishing with stiff collars and heavy wool coats. Most clothing was just sponged off in those days because it was wool … but you became acclimated to the heat. Nature gradually gets cooler and gradually gets hotter, giving your body and mind time to adjust.” ― Francis Bailey
“But the story goes back before I was born, as everyone’s story does. It started when our family came to Sanibel. Daddy came in the summer of 1894 when he was 21 years old; Mother’s family came in the summer of 1895 … why come to Sanibel? Well, why did anyone go out west? To start a new lease on life … my family’s move to Sanibel is really no different from the gold miners who picked up and headed off to the unknown to make their living.” ― Francis Bailey
where Sam Bailey was born, and where Francis Bailey raised his children. Frank and Annie Bailey had three sons, John being the third. As Bailey children were born, rooms were added to the house, as the story is told.
Pat Kiely, also on the docent tour, says she had visited the Bailey Homestead Preserve a couple of times. It’s where her boss, Mead Johnson, lived. Johnson is the daughter of Francis Bailey. “I love this place,” says Kiely, who keeps an inscribed copy of Francis Bailey’s book. “And if I ever had any questions about it, Mead walked us through it."