William took ownership of his homestead in 1912, and
purchased an overage of 160 acres from the state. In 1913 he
started to plat the land. People from all over the country started
coming to stay or live on the island, including the Harrington
family from Ohio, the Gaston family from Wisconsin and the
Conn family from Louisville. Florida families, such as the Hites,
the Knights and the Sparkmans, also started coming to Little
Gasparilla.
The original streets on Little Gasparilla Island included Plum,
Grand, Wharf, Will and Water. The name of the town was
Seaboard. Things were going well until the Depression, at which
time ridiculously high property taxes combined with a miserable
economy brought building and prosperity on Little Gasparilla
Island to a halt.
In 1957 Little Gasparilla Pass, which used to mark the north
end of Gasparilla Island, closed. In 1960 Hurricane Donna
closed it entirely, and eventually it turned into a marshy grass
fl at. The land that is now Don Pedro Island, once owned by the
Vanderbilt family, was connected to the mainland by a small
bridge at one time. It was destroyed when the Intracoastal
Waterway was created. Now Don Pedro and Little Gasparilla
Island are, in a sense, connected, and if the tide is right you can
walk from one to the other.
Rob Hill’s family came to Little Gasparilla in the 1970s, but
at that time it was to only be a temporary move while they
looked for a home on the mainland. Rob said eventually they
decided to just stay on the island, and in the early 1980s they
began construction on their new home.
“Our original ‘beach house’ we lived in was on the bay with
its own dock, but lacked the storage space needed for living
there full time,” he said. “We needed a home with bigger closets,
a pantry and room to store things, like Christmas decorations.
Our fi rst Christmas on the island we decided to go all in with
the island life. We went out on the beach side of the island
and cut a little Australian Pine tree and attached it to a base to
use for a Christmas tree ... it was a little sparse to say the least.
My dad overcame this by cutting a second one down and cut
branches from it. Those branches were inserted into holes he
drilled in the fi rst tree and the thinner areas became fuller.
A view of the long, stately sprawl of docks
along the eastern side of the island, and a
sampling of the many types of architecture
you’ll fi nd.