LIVING HISTORY
Manatee Center are now. The boat-building business was
later sold to George T. Backus, father of A.E. “Bean’’ Backus,
who would become a well-known landscape painter, and
Tod Backus, who would make the boat-building company
nationally known.
By 1904, R.R. Gladwin had become the young city of Fort
Pierce’s first elected mayor. He later served as a St. Lucie
County Commissioner after its breakaway from Brevard
County in 1905, and he was on the St. Lucie County School
Board when the site for the yellow brick school on Delaware
Avenue was selected and the school was built. He also served
as president of the Board of Trade, the precursor to the Chamber
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of Commerce.
According to a 1910 legal ad appearing in the local newspaper,
R.R. Gladwin with two partners, W.R. Jackson and W.W.
Luce, formed Jackson-Luce-Gladwin, with each partner owning
20 shares of the corporation. The company operated a hardware
store in downtown, which sold everything from furniture
to automobiles, according to advertisements of the time.
MEMOIR DETAILS
Much of what I have been able to learn about the family’s
early history came from a memoir Bob Gladwin wrote
just before his death in 1988. Bob reported that the family’s
income during their early years in Fort Pierce was being supplemented
by a land deal R.R. apparently made as a railway
agent, buying a pineapple field in Biscayne Bay, the site of
present-day downtown Miami. Bob said land agents would
An account from a 1904 newspaper, said to be the oldest known copy of
any Fort Pierce newspaper, gives an account of Robert Reed Gladwin’s term
>> while mayor of Fort Pierce.
R.R. Gladwin formed Jackson-Luce-Gladwin with
two other partners in 1910. By 1915, the company
had gone bust, reversing the fortunes of one
of Fort Pierce’s most prominent citizens.
A 1906 ad appearing in the St. Lucie
County Tribune touts R.R. Gladwin’s
boat-building business.