Former SMR CEO takes pride in being part of the vision of Lakewood Ranch

It was a huge, mowed field during the infancy of Lakewood Ranch in 1980, but it was an unknown spot to Schroeder-Manatee Ranch CEO Mary Fran Carroll.

Carroll, who died in 2014 at age 92, used to say she loved venturing into the fields on the SMR property, picking tomatoes or citrus on her way to work. She would slip her bounty into a pair of bags she always kept in her car.

One particular day, though, as she hiked away from the road to find some produce, she came upon a strange sight while filling up her bag. It was the aforementioned field. And what were those white pipes coming straight up out of the ground at each end?

“Our first polo was played on a Bahia grass cattle pasture,” says John Clarke, who at the time was a president at SMR. “Our agricultural manager, Clive Morris, had played polo all his life and was a very good rider. He found a nice flat field and asked a tomato farmer to run his leveler over it. Then Clive mowed it and put up some white pipes for the goals.”

An avid polo player himself, Clarke joined Morris to recruit several other polo enthusiasts who worked for SMR. They just hadn’t mentioned it to Carroll, who was all business. Upon finding the field, Carroll told Morris and Clarke, “Well, just do not install lights.”

On a warm September morning, Clarke stands on the Sarasota Polo Club field and reminisces about his career with SMR. He has been retired since 2005 and hasn’t played polo in more than a decade, but he drives past the polo club each day as he makes his way to the eastern end of University Parkway, where he walks his own dogs and others that belong to his immediate family members. SMR owns land there that is used partially as a tree farm, and the dogs love it. At 83, Clarke enjoys his dogsitting duties and the exercise that goes with it but loves the bird-watching on his daily route even more.

His love and understanding of finances and agriculture originally led him to SMR, which needed his expertise of managing vast farms and ranches to clean up SMR’s 30,000-plus acres. His success in making the ranch’s agricultural sector profitable led him into a greater role in forming what eventually became the Lakewood Ranch master-planned community. Oddly enough, that off-the-beaten-path polo field helped lead to Lakewood Ranch becoming a national phenomenon.

Eventually, Robin and James Uihlein, who were in Florida playing polo in Palm Beach, came over to the ranch and found the rough polo field that had been constructed. They were members of the Uihlein family who owned the 48-square-mile tract of land that had been pieced together by John Schroeder in the 1920s. They began playing with the SMR employees and some local cowboys.

“They encouraged us to build a polo complex,” says Clarke, who had owned farms in Kenya, where he grew up, and later Rhodesia. Those farms both included a selection of polo ponies because of Clarke’s love of the sport.

SMR struggled to make gains in getting development approvals in Sarasota County, so Clarke and SMR executives decided to present a polo complex to the Sarasota County Commission as a quasi-agricultural development.

“That worked, and suddenly we were doing business in Sarasota County,” Clarke says, noting that Robin Uihlein was a major stockholder who sat on SMR’s board of directors and who was the main force in taking the project forward.

Lakewood Ranch’s recognition as the nation’s No. 1-selling master-planned community earlier this year didn’t come without a lot of work and some strokes of genius. The roughly constructed polo field led to one of them.

Carroll quickly got on board with the idea of a polo complex. Lots of Floridians get to live alongside a golf course, she reasoned. How many live alongside a polo field?

The polo club began selling homes in 1990. By 1991, a polo complex accompanied the parcels all around it. The polo club was a kick-start to what followed as Carroll would convince many well-to-do folks in the region to drive to the boonies to watch polo. Once there, they would realize the area wasn’t all that remote. Some were future Lakewood Ranch homeowners.

From vision to reality

Carroll had hired Clarke in 1983 because he had been managing huge ranches with absentee owners in Florida through his company, AMS, a subsidiary of Turner Foods Corp., in Punta Gorda. He did that so well he sold AMS and was hired as SMR president in 1989.

Standing in front of the clubhouse at the Sarasota Polo Club, Clarke smiles as he talks about how the vision of Lakewood Ranch became a reality and the pride he has in being part of it. Several times he excuses himself for his octogenarian’s memory, saying his dates and facts might be a bit off. Upon checking, however, his recollection remains sharp. Despite his age, the Cambridge-educated Clarke retains the aura of a leader. He is a tall man of about 6-foot-3, and even if he no longer is flag-pole straight, he oozes authority. That had to help him in his early days with SMR because he self-admittedly wasn’t the dynamic, aggressive, tough director that Carroll was or that Rex Jensen would be in following Clarke as president and CEO.

“I am a sweetheart,” Clarke says with a laugh as he compares himself to Carroll and Jensen.

Sweetheart or not, Clarke knew how to get things accomplished.

Carroll recognized that when she hired him. Besides his business aplomb, she knew he had overcome adversity. In Kenya, he was a successful farmer whose main crop was pyrethrum, which has been used for centuries as an insecticide. As Kenya gained independence in the 1960s, the farm land was nationalized, and Clarke was forced out of the country in 1968. He moved to Rhodesia, where he started another farm, this one of 7,000 acres, where his main crop was tobacco. After 10 years there, internal strife in the country once again forced him out. He moved to the U.S. in 1977. His road eventually took him to the area that became Lakewood Ranch, which had few roads when he arrived.

Zoned for agriculture, Lakewood Ranch had no choices when Clarke went looking for a home. He has lived more than 30 years in Sarasota at the same Meadows home that was built by developer Roger Postlethwaite, who eventually served as a president of SMR Communities. 

“This was as close (to Lakewood Ranch) as I could get,” he says.

Driving down University Parkway today is a stark contrast to when Clarke moved into the Meadows; University Park ended at Interstate 75 at the time, unless you wanted to drive a dusty shell mining road.

Things were exciting for the new resident in December 1989, as Carroll’s vision for a residential revolution came to fruition with the approval of the Cypress Banks Development of Regional Impact, an area that now includes some of Lakewood Ranch’s original communities, such as Summerfield and Riverwalk.

It came after Clarke, Carroll and several other team members visited some of the biggest master-planned communities in the U.S., including the 90,000-acre Irvine Ranch in California, the Howard Hughes development near Las Vegas that became Summerlin and The Highlands in Texas.

Clarke buzzes through his memories of those early days of Lakewood Ranch but says he doesn’t want to proceed without touching upon the history of the area. He talks about the early 1920s when Schroeder fell into financial misfortune because he went into the furniture business in Milwaukee. Clarke says Schroeder went to his friends, the Uihleins, who had made a fortune after taking over the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. Clarke says the Uihleins bought the property in 1922 for an outrageously low $2 an acre.

The 48-square-mile property hosted several business endeavors, such as timber, vegetable and citrus farming and ranching, but never made money in an agricultural sense. Most of the Uihleins lived in Milwaukee during the first half of the 20th century, and there was no coordinated effort to make money. Their Florida property was more for recreation, where family members and friends could hunt quail or deer.

Clarke says the Uihlein family was at odds with what to do with the property until the early 1980s, when Marie Uihlein went to Carroll, a banker with Northern Trust in Chicago, and asked Carroll to represent her on the SMR board of directors. Carroll managed to unify the Uihlein family in their plans for Lakewood Ranch.

“She brought a business sense to the operation,” Clarke says. “Agriculture had to be thought about.”

Carroll was elected as board chair and hired Clarke to get the agricultural side working efficiently.

One of the keys was landing a deal with Manatee County and the city of Bradenton to get treated wastewater. The irrigation had been done to that point with wells. Aggregate mining took off with Wendel Kent (who died in 2017) leading the way with his business, Quality Aggregates. Clarke says it was a relatively simple and straightforward business. It was quickly profitable for SMR.

Carroll was aware there were moves to build an airport on SMR land. That wasn’t going to happen, but it did force the Uihleins to begin to make decisions about their land.

Developers saw what was coming and started making offers for parcels of SMR’s land. But after SMR executives had visited other master-planned communities, they turned them down.

“At the end of the day, what those trips said to us was to not try to cut off little pieces of land,” Clarke says. “Think of it as a new town, and it will be much more valuable than cutting it into pieces.”

Everything steamed forward, and Carroll retired from her CEO duties in 1995. Clarke took over as president and CEO. Although Carroll remained chair of the board, she retired completely in 1997.

“We knew where we were going and where we had to go,” Clarke says.

A place of pride

Looking back on it all, Clarke is proud of the overall development, though as a former farmer he says he does miss the cows and the citrus. But he also loves what Lakewood Ranch provides for families. Lakewood Ranch’s slogan of “Live, Work and Play” is personal.

“The plan was to build a place where you could go to school, to college, the theater. We wanted a full life for everyone. We offered land to the Sarasota Orchestra, but they said, ‘Hell no.’”

SMR created other things that make him proud.

“One of the great things the Uihleins did was set aside corridors of land that were natural environmental corridors,” he says. “There are defined stream beds and river beds out there, and it would be difficult to develop anyway, but one shouldn’t. Places like Heritage Ranch, which is gorgeous country.”

Another piece of visionary work was SMR negotiating to buy the right-of-way land that eventually allowed Lorraine Road and Lakewood Ranch Boulevard to be extended to Fruitville Road. That has become a big deal as Waterside Place, in Sarasota County, expands.

SMR’s battles with Sarasota County made it seem unlikely that Waterside Place could ever happen. But it did with Jensen, who had been involved in all aspects of permitting for that very first Polo Club project, leading the way. Clarke says he originally hired Jensen because of his expertise in getting development approvals. But Jensen pulled some miracles in Sarasota County as Lakewood Ranch grew.

“I very much didn’t believe Waterside would be that dense,” Clarke says.

He also says he never anticipated Manatee County would take over the Premier Sports Campus, but it did. And he tips his hat to James and Misdee Miller for buying the Sarasota Polo Club from SMR.

“Rex was wise to sell the polo club,” he says.

After retiring from SMR, Clarke started the Lakewood Ranch Community Fund, which supports the community’s local nonprofits.

“I still feel a part of Lakewood Ranch because I go there,” he says. “I think it is turning into a very nice hometown. People enjoy it so much. Lakewood Ranch has excellent schools, sports, aesthetics, churches and so many other special aspects. Look at Bob Gardner Park. … Those kinds of things make for a greater quality of life.”