Port St. Lucie 50th Anniversary
LIVING HISTORY
rial Health Systems will open a hospital near Torrey Pines.
Tradition also features The Landing, a large shopping center
that draws customers from as far away as Fort Pierce.
Clint Westberry, who arrived in Port St. Lucie in 1978 and
retired to Central Florida in 1993, built a model home in St.
Lucie West, in the Country Club Estates neighborhood near the
development’s golf course. The owner of Westberry Homes, he
also had a model home on Port St. Lucie Boulevard.
“When they started St. Lucie West, I bought the first lot and
built the first model home,” he says. “My model appeared
in Life magazine. They were talking about the good life, and
they took pictures of it. It is on the corner of Country Club
Drive and Mockingbird Lane, and it’s 3,100 square feet with a
lot of unique features.”
Becky Post O’Brien, daughter of insurance agency founder O.
R. “Bob” Post who has since retired, was born in 1974. Her sister
Kathy, who now runs Post Insurance & Financial in St. Lucie
West, was taught by Beth Gessner at Port St. Lucie Elementary.
The school system was undergoing big changes when little
Becky Post started school at Port St. Lucie Elementary in
1980. Mandatory busing had been imposed by a federal judge
to ensure integration. She attended four public schools between
first and eighth grade and finally went to John Carroll
Catholic High school for four years — the only 4 consecutive
years in one school since first grade. “As I was growing and
maturing, so was the city growing and maturing,” she says.
ASTONISHING GROWTH
The city’s astonishing growth during the 1980s and 1990s
kept it in the headlines as one of the fastest-growing cities in
the nation. The population, which was 330 in 1970, shot up to
37
PORT ST. LUCIE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Clint Westberry’s Westberry Homes built the first model home in St. Lucie
West, in Country Club Estates at the corner of Country Club Drive and
Mockingbird Drive. It was an energy efficient home near a golf course
intended to attract buyers to a new golfing community.
PORT ST. LUCIE GROWTH
1961 – Population 0, size 50 square miles
1970 – Population 330, size 67 square miles
1980 – Population 14,690, size 68 square miles
1990 – Population 55,860, size 77 square miles
2000 – Population 88,769, size 77 square miles
2011 – Population 165,000, size 116 square miles
Source: Port St. Lucie Planning and Zoning Department
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