Bean was a lawyer from New England, and his plan was to build up the
small, depressed town on the banks of the Myakka River with a huge
hotel, complete with a Spanish Revival motif, hexagonal wings and
vast, high-ceilinged lobby areas. Part of his idea to call it El Jobe-An
was the fact that the name sounded vaguely Spanish, and he touted
it as the “The City of Destiny.”
This was a far cry from what the town was prior to Bean’s
arrival; it was actually quite bleak. With not much there but
work camps and factories, many of the prisoners - who were
more or less slaves - were treated very inhumanely. They were
starved, abused, and sometimes murdered. The black prisoners
were treated the worst, and people who were children there
in the 1920s recalled watching men being fl ogged on a regular
basis.
If they died, their bodies were dumped in mass graves at
Southland Cemetery, which is now almost impossible to fi nd.
It is the oldest cemetery in Charlotte County, but even though
local Boy Scouts attempt to keep things orderly there, it is mostly
overgrown. When the tourist trade became brisker in this part of
the state, many of those horrifi c problems faded away and became
part of history.
Ignoring that aspect of the area, Joel Bean put out brochures encouraging
people to come and stay in his newly-named town.
“Not in the wide, wide world is to be found a
superior climate of more even temperature, more
sunshiny days and starry night, more attractive
waters with as gamey fi sh … or more satisfying
conditions for the full enjoyment of life in God’s
great out-of-doors, than at El Jobe-An,” the brochure
boldly stated. Those were boastful words,
but Bean knew he could capitalize on the tourism
trade that was headed to Gasparilla Island for
socializing at the newly-built Gasparilla Inn, and for
tarpon fi shing.
Things were going well for Bean until the Great
Depression. While Gasparilla Island could brace
for the impact and hold up quite well, El Jobe-
An could not. Bean’s 28-room hotel, named the
Grand Hotel and Fishing Lodge, was loaned out
for a Hollywood fi lm that was supposed to be
set in French Indochina. Even that meager income
wasn’t enough to keep Bean’s dream alive, and by
the mid-1930s another group of people came to
town - the circus.
Bean sold the hotel to a man named Leo “Suicide”
Simon, a well-known circus performer from
Gibsonton. If you’ve heard of the place, you know
its nickname is Showtown, and it used to be (and
still is, to some extent) a place for carnival performers
to settle in during the winter.
continued on pg 38
May/June 2020 GASPARILLA MAGAZINE 35