100 years ago, when Owen Burns moved to Sarasota and transformed it from a backwater fishing village to a resort city. His life is being celebrated this week.

At least the story made Page 1.



When Owen Burns died late Saturday evening, Aug. 28, 1937, the Sarasota Herald covered his funeral service with an unbylined story, just five inches in length, at the bottom of the front page on Tuesday, three days later.



Besides the details -- survivors, pallbearers, where the service was held (on Monday evening in the Burns home at 310 N. Gulf Stream Ave.) -- there was just one sentence about Burns' 27 years here.



"He came to Sarasota in 1910 and was a leader in practically every movement that saw Sarasota grow from a fishing village to one of Florida's leading resort cities," the article said, without hyperbole.



Perhaps the editors felt no need to repeat the obvious. Evidence of Burns' development efforts was all around them.



The city was full of landmarks -- Burns Court, Herald Square and the John Ringling Hotel among them -- and infrastructure that Burns created, starting almost immediately upon arriving here from Chicago in May 1910, just weeks after another wealthy Chicagoan, Bertha Palmer, who was in essence American royalty before the Kennedys, put Sarasota on the map with her own move south.



Burns is getting more publicity now, a lot more. So important was he to the city's early history that his life is being celebrated with Owen Burns Week, starting Monday. (See sidebar for schedule of events.)



That Mr. Ringling



Burns had grown accustomed to being overshadowed by larger-than-life figures. When his longtime business partner-turned-adversary, John Ringling, died nine months earlier, in December 1936, the news made headlines across the nation. The Herald -- it would become the Herald-Tribune a couple years later -- honored its No. 1 part-time resident with a banner headline atop the front page. As head of the Ringling Circus, "Mister John" was much more well-known than Owen Burns. But whether he did more for the city is open for debate.



Ringling arrived in Sarasota in 1911, a year after Burns. But while Burns set about transforming the town into a city immediately after buying 75 percent of it from J. Hamilton Gillespie for $35,000, Ringling spent his time in Sarasota mostly at leisure before jumping on the Florida real estate bandwagon in the 1920s.



Even if Burns had retired from developing in 1920, after 10 years here, "he still would have been a significant player" in the city's progression, said local historian Jeff LaHurd.



"Owen Burns had a lasting influence on Sarasota, in that his time here extended over several decades," said Lorrie Muldowney of the Sarasota County History Center, "and it was a time when there were so many public improvements going on ... dredging and filling, and things that remain intact today, and really shaped the downtown urban waterfront."



Burns made them happen.



"Even if he had just come and done all that dredging, he would have played a significant role," said LaHurd, who likes to tell audiences at his lectures: "All you needed then was a note from your mother" to dredge or build. (Burns did have something of a note from his mother: Martha Burns desperately missed having a Catholic church when she came here, so, like a good son, he donated the property for original St. Martha's Church.)



Burns had two dredges, one of them named the Sand Pecker, which he used to create Golden Gate Point out of bay bottom, adding onto was then called Cedar Point. That became the starting point of the first John Ringling Bridge, which Burns built, of course. One of his dredges is believed to be sunken in the channel behind Otter Key; it can be seen in satellite photos on Mapquest or Google Earth.



The irony is that while Burns was a prolific dredge-and-fill man, he also was an avid fisherman who had the largest library of fishing books in the city, according to a 1937 column in the Herald-Tribune. After Arvida Corp. and other developers dredged and filled extensively in the 1950s and '60s, the practice was outlawed in the state around 1970. It is bad for fishing because it damages estuaries. In Burns' day, though, the bay was so packed with fish that the effect of dredging may have been difficult to notice.



A town in need



Burns was born into old money -- his grandfather was a hero of the War of 1812 -- and he built on his fortune by marketing savings banks for the home. That wealth enabled him to buy Sarasota real estate at a time when the local land market was struggling, after the Panic of 1907.



Despite what LaHurd calls "its intrinsic natural beauty," Sarasota's "downtown" was rustic to a fault when Burns arrived. It had only occasional electric service, dirt roads with cattle wandering freely, and a waterfront lined with fishing shacks. The local hotel, built by Gillespie in 1887, was in poor condition.



"From the beginning, he was right at improving the town," said LaHurd. "He did a lot of seawall work along the downtown bayfront.



"The other interesting thing ... is that it was always about selling real estate. The only time there was a lapse in that was during the Depression and World War II. When there was very little (real estate) activity in an idyllic little community, that is not the way it was supposed to be as far as people were concerned."



Burns was a banker as well as a developer. He founded Citizens Bank on May 8, 1911; it became First National Bank shortly after he started it, said LaHurd.



He also founded a board of trade (later to become the Chamber of Commerce) in 1911.



Victim of the bust



As a real estate broker and developer, Burns profited from his investment in the city. But when the real estate boom took off in the 1920s, Burns got caught up in it, as did so many other prominent citizens.



Timing is everything in real estate, and that is the case with the El Vernona Hotel. When noted Chicago developer Andrew McAnsh came to Sarasota in 1922 to build a world-class hotel, the Mira Mar on Palm Avenue, he was met by a parade at the train station. McAnsh caught the real estate wave early and built the hotel in 1923; it enjoyed several successful seasons before the real estate bust and stayed popular for decades. That the city gave him free utilities and a full property tax exemption for 10 years helped.



Burns was "really a reticent guy. So I don't know if he wanted a parade," said LaHurd. "But yes, they took McAnsh with horns honking and flares going and really did it up. Because that is what they needed. They needed a world-class hotel to attract the people they wanted. And that is what McAnsh gave them."



Burns, though, launched the El Vernona as the real estate tsunami was beginning to wash out to sea.



"Definitely the timing was bad on that," said LaHurd. "It opened New Year's Eve 1926" -- the year the boom went bust.



"Burns was on this committee to rein in the finances of the city, so you know he knew what was going on," said LaHurd.



The Ringling suit



Burns partnered with John Ringling on many ventures, but at the same time the market was going south, Ringling and Burns became embroiled in a dispute that ended up in court. Burns believed Ringling was taking money from their Ringling Estates development, in which Burns had a 25 percent stake, and siphoning it into Ringling's pet project -- a failing, and never completed, Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the south end of Longboat Key.



Burns sued. Ringling prevailed in court. That sent Burns into financial ruin, and he lost the El Vernona.



To add insult to injury, Ringling bought the hotel at a deep discount and named it after himself.



But this incident did not ruin a friendship. Ringling and Burns were just business associates, not friends. They addressed each other as "Mister" in their letters, which were frequent because Ringling was often away from Sarasota.



"They were definitely dissimilar personalities," said LaHurd. Ringling, the world-traveling, bigger-than-life conspicuous consumer, and Burns, the ambitious, achieving but reserved family man.



So Burns, who reinvented himself when he came to Sarasota, did so again. Nearly broke, he started a fruit company, selling citrus and guava products. It was based in the old Sarasota Times building, and he operated the company until his death.



"I'm just amazed at what Burns managed to do with no experience doing it," said LaHurd. "It's not like he was like McAnsh, who had a reputation as a town builder. Burns just came and formed these companies and went forward with them. It's amazing."



Ringling had about $300 in the bank when he died, but left his home and art museum to the state.



Aristocrat of Beauty



Burns' prominence in the city was built on his real estate activities, but it was enhanced by the elegance of his family. And that started with Vernona, who was 18 when she married Owen, 43, on June 4, 1912.



She was vacationing in Sarasota with her family when she met Burns. He was smitten with her, and boldly jumped on the train at the Lemon Avenue station as her family headed back home. During the trip north, he continued to court her, successfully.



"Evidently," said LaHurd, "they had a great marriage."



When he built his luxury hotel, Burns named it after his wife; the hotel was referred to as "The Aristocrat of Beauty."



The couple had five children and became one of the city's leading families. Their comings and goings were often mentioned on the Herald-Tribune's "In the Realm of Society" page.



In 1937, a few months before Owen's death, the family was saluted in a Herald-Tribune society column written by "Miss Sarasota," pictured as a stylish young woman with a fetching hat.



"Mrs. Burns ... is one of the most beloved women in town, and always seems to have time for her many friends in spite of her exacting duties as housewife and mother to a very active and interesting family," the columnist wrote. "Her gracious hospitality, her quiet friendliness, and her charm have won her many loyal friends."



Vernona Freeman Burns lived another 43 years, until 1974, and never remarried.



Owen Burns is remembered by his lone surviving daughter, Harriet Stieff, as a loving father and husband.



She tells the story of a Saturday evening in August 1937. Owen Burns called his son over to him as the young man, celebrating his 21st birthday, headed out for the evening.



"You're not too old to give your father a hug," said the elder. The young man complied with his father's request and then left the house. Owen Burns remarked that he did not feel well and went to bed. He died later that night.



Another daughter, Lillian, was a local historian and a tireless storyteller of her father's efforts on behalf of the city.



Lillian Burns, who died in 2001, told researchers that in the depths of her father's financial problems, she found him tearing up IOUs. "He told Lillian they were just money and you shouldn't put stock in that," said LaHurd.



Like her parents and three other siblings, Lillian is buried in a shady family plot in Rosemary Cemetery on Central Avenue.