Doc's Dream – Part One

Leland L. “Doc” Loach, the visionary pioneer developer who turned Isles of Capri from a string of mangrove islands into the exclusive waterfront community it is today, rightfully deserves to be recognized alongside the great pioneers in Collier County history as we commemorate the county’s centennial. 

But Doc Loach didn’t do it alone - far from it. His wife, Rosanna Loach, was every bit his equal. In fact, one could say her imprint on Collier County is every bit as impressive as her husband’s.

Doc Loach cut his teeth as a developer on the east coast of Florida, where he started the Chula Vista neighborhood in Ft. Lauderdale after stints in chiropractic school and the U.S. Navy.  Chula Vista, which translates to pretty view, is where Loach created a community of some 90 families. Like he would do later on Isles of Capri, Loach dug canals, built seawalls, streets, and all of the infrastructure needed to enjoy the good life of South Florida.

Today Chula Vista is a neighborhood of 1,154 and is ranked as one of the top five neighborhoods to raise a family in Ft. Lauderdale.

Doc married Rosanna in Chula Vista, and one day in the mid-50s, the couple followed the old Tamiami Trail to the West Coast of Florida. They found Royal Palm Hammock and turned left toward Marco Island, which was then a sleepy fishing village with sparse settlements at Marco (now Old Marco), Caxambas, and Goodland. They crossed the old Goodland swing bridge and settled in for a fishing vacation at the Marco Lodge. They were in the only room available at the lodge that night, and so begins the Isles of Capri story.

Doc and Rosanna fished from Kelly Gant’s dock the next morning. Doc sent Rosanna to inquire about available lots on the island.

Her inquiries went nowhere. These were the days prior to the arrival of the Mackle Brothers and the Deltona Corporation, the developers of modern Marco Island. The locals were none too eager to sell to outsiders from the East Coast.

A trip into Naples the next morning for a bait bucket led the pioneering couple to the real estate office of Benson, Pulling and Jones. The salesman, George Buser, showed them a string of fourteen mangrove islands. Doc immediately recognized that the islands were on the Marco River. Three weeks later, Loach purchased six hundred acres in the group of mangrove islands for $350 an acre.

As Rosanna said in an article for The Timepiece, a publication of the Collier County Historical Society in 1988, “The seed for the Isles of Capri was planted. This was to be a very unique development, fashioning a viable community out of dense mangrove swampland. But Doc had a vision - to create a place where man and nature could live in harmony. If he gave thought to the vast array of problems that would provoke him, it was outweighed by his enthusiasm to complete his dream.”

Doc set up shop in an office with a dirt floor on Marco Island, renting from Elva and Grits Griffiths. Elva was one of Tommie Barfield’s daughters. Grits was well-known as a county commissioner from 1943-1957. Elva and Grits also owned the Islander Motel. According to Rosanna's account, Doc purchased two wooden boats with outboard motors and rented dock space on Marco.

Prospects were ferried from Marco to see Doc’s vision of Isles of Capri in those small wooden boats. Doc brought over M.E. Berry, his engineer at Chula Vista, to help him develop Isles of Capri from a clump of mangrove islands into its modern-day splendor.

In 1956 work began in earnest on the Isles of Capri. Loach worked with the Internal Improvement Board and the U.S. Corps of Engineers. A bulkhead was built to retain the fill that was pumped. A tidy sum of five cents per yard had to be paid to the State of Florida, according to Rosanna’s account.

Loach could have given up after the dredge he purchased sank in Lake Okeechobee. But he ignored his advisors and led a mission to save the dredge and finally had a working dredge stationed on the Marco River.

Loach received permission to start a ferry service between Isles of Capri and Marco but received blowback from the settlement at Marco, who were resistant to further development of the area.

The dredging effort took five years, with the dredge pumping 20 hours a day. On island number one, all the trees and undergrowth were pushed over and buried. On island number two and three and the business island, the debris was pushed over and burned before it was covered with fill, according to Rosanna Loach’s accounts. Sand, silt and marl were pumped in to connect the four main islands, and the roadbeds were filled to 5’6” above sea level. Doc insisted on the extra six inches of fill despite the expense that entailed.

Loach built the first house on Capri and moved in with Rosanna and their young daughter Rosemary. Their home was on the Marco River. Riverfront lots in those days commanded $5,000.

Loach’s next challenge was to come up with better accessibility to the Isles of Capri. He petitioned the Collier County Commission, which was then in Everglades City. They voted to grant him permission to pump in a causeway across McIlvane Bay.

Loach got permission and soon attacked the road project with the same vigor as he did his dredging project. He completed a roadbed with shell from a local shell mound that was hauled in to stabilize the sand. But the shells presented their own challenges in the form of flat tires. Nevertheless, the completed road, known then and for decades later as Isles of Capri Road (now known as S.R. 951), allowed Loach to finally set up shop on the Isles of Capri.

Loach returned to the County Commissioners with a plan to pave Isles of Capri Road. He agreed to “bear the burden” of about $35,000 for the grass seed and fertilizer needed to complete berms on both sides of the seven miles of road.  

"Isles of Capri now had a first-class roadway to the outside world,” Rosanna Loach wrote.

In 1969 the first high-rise bridge was completed on Marco Island (now known as the Judge Jolley Bridge), providing a more convenient connection for Marco Island to the Naples mainland.

An early visitor to Isles of Capri described her experience: “We came out here with a real estate salesman from Naples in 1958, who assured us that there was a new development out there someplace reputed to be waterfront property. The farther we got from Naples, the lower my spirits sank. When we turned off Route 41 and rattled over a few bridges, I knew genuine despair. When we got out here we found a dredge at work at one end of the island and the bulldozer scraping mangroves off the other end. The only promising thing I could see was Doc’s enthusiasm and optimism. As he extolled the wonders to come, I couldn’t see any of them, but my husband could see all of them. It was a case of love at first sight with him. We bought a lot that very day. We both signed the papers in a state of shock - mine from dread, my husband’s from elation - he’d found Utopia. Happily, I’ve changed my first impression; and also, happily, my husband never has. He’s still living in Utopia.”

One of the Loach’s proudest achievements was providing potable water to the Isles of Capri. Initially, it was a 45,000-gallon reservoir that was filled with water hauled in twice daily from Naples. Rosanna said that Doc “must have drilled 175-200 test wells” in search of a potable well field. Doc was finally able to secure permission from the Collier Company to use a well on Manatee Road with the understanding that the county could take over the facility any time they saw fit. Capri Water Works was born in 1963 and operated until 1981, when an agreement was concluded for the purchase of the utility by Collier County.

Doc had to file a lawsuit against the Collier County School Board and the State of Florida to get school bus service to the Isles of Capri. Prior to that he delivered his daughter to Marco by motorboat to attend Tommie Barfield Elementary.

He had to threaten to put in his own telephone lines before the telephone company would drop their demands for telephone lines from $22,000 to a more reasonable $2,200. Rosanna reported that Florida Power and Light was “far more cooperative, helping in every way possible by installing poles and lines for electricity and by providing very satisfactory service.”

Mail delivery was another challenge. Initially, mailboxes were placed on S.R. 951, near U.S. 41. By 1968 street signs and house numbers were provided, and house to house mail delivery commenced. The mail carrier also delivered the newspaper.

By 1963 there were 23 registered voters on Isles of Capri, and they were given their own precinct. Rosanna said that the Isles of Capri “led the county in voter turnout, achieving an enviable 100 percent turnout several times.”

After all the hard lifting had been done, Doc Loach was delivered a blow that even he couldn’t overcome.

“Just as Doc was about to breathe a sigh of relief at having surmounted all his problems,” Rosanna wrote, “fate’s hand dealt the cruelest blow. Doc became a victim of Parkinson’s disease, which would keep him from experiencing the true exhilaration of success. But the groundwork he laid had a firm foundation. The community was growing and vibrant.”

By the early 1970s, Doc was rarely seen in public. He passed in 1987. Fortunately for modern day Capri residents, his strong wife was more than capable of carrying on.

Rosanna Loach was a nurse by training. She became a real estate broker in 1969. She was the face of Loach, Inc., Developer on Capri Boulevard. She was a kind but no-nonsense woman who was ahead of her time in the business world.

Loach’s key salesman in the 1970s was a gentleman named Ver Lynn Sprague, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Kentucky Fried Chicken colonel. Sprague was on the island early enough to pluck one of the island’s prime lots at 195 Pago Pago West. Sprague was the features editor for Gulfshore Living magazine and supplemented his income by touring the country giving speeches as an Abraham Lincoln expert.

When Chris Middlebrook arrived on Isles of Capri in March of 1979, he started as a salesman for Rosanna. He would later open his own real estate office on the Isles. He was also the first fire chief on the island. Middlebrook’s son Beau, who currently has his own real estate office on Capri, was six weeks old at the time. Middlebrook caught Doc Loach at the end of his life.

"He was old, and he had had a stroke, and he had dementia,” Middlebrook said, "so he couldn't really talk. And he was confined to a wheelchair or using a walker and shuffling his feet, but he couldn't communicate. And then he died.”

Doc Loach died in 1987 at 80.

Middlebrook worked hand in hand with Rosanna Loach. He respected her as a business woman who was ahead of her time.

She was known for her trademark pronunciation of Miami. It was always “Miamuh” for Rosanna Loach.

"It's called Miamuh,” Middlebrook laughs. "Like there's no E sound at the end. Yeah, that's exactly right. She would call it Miamuh.”

"I'll tell you,” Middlebrook reflects, "today she would fit right in with the women's movement becoming more accepted and prominent in the business world. But she did that back then, and she was just as tough as can be. She was intelligent. She was a nurse that was very successful. Rosanna was the type of lady I would vote for to be president. I love that strong of a woman. And she was fair. But like I say, when she said something, it was, 'I have spoken.' And that's what she would say. This is what she had to say and that's the way it went. So there was no more discussion.”

“She was really the motivator behind Doc,” Middlebrook said. “Doc was the facilitator to do the boots-on-the-ground work of the dredging, fill, and getting all that going. And you know, Doc put the road in from 952 to 951 so people could travel without having to go all the way around Goodland and come in through Marco. But Rosanna was kind of like the kingpin there. Nobody really did anything much without getting her approval. She owned all the lots that were still not sold. She was a great lady. I really have the utmost respect because she had lived there with Doc while they were developing Capri. And they had to bring stuff across by boat from Old Marco to Pelican Street and bring those initial building materials over and the dredge machines and that took a long time. It took many years that she and Doc lived there and you know, they didn't have air conditioning and they were fighting the mosquitoes. And it was tough in the beginning for them. But, you know, he was the pioneer and she was the strength behind Doc.”

Middlebrook said Rosanna Loach was not one to be trifled with.

“I don't want to say she was forceful,” Middlebrook said, "but she was firm. And you had an automatic respect for her from the get-go. She wasn't diplomatic about it, you know. She would call it right out if she sees it. That's the way it is. She was very much a professional lady. And she was used to dealing with people. And she butted heads with the county commissioners and the people that were overseeing the approvals for their project. And she downright was getting into some scrappy fights - verbally of course - with the powers to be. But she was very well known and had that reputation that you just don't mess with her. You know she was a tough businesswoman. She would put on these Capri Civic Association dinners every month. And she would invite everybody, no matter who you were, to come out to dinner and she would pay for it. And that's how she started the Civic Association. And of course, she was the president of it for a good many years. But she did a lot of giving back to the community. That’s why we have the fire station and that land the fire station sits on. And paying to have the building built. I credit her as much as I credit Doc Loach for taking Capri to the point they got to now because they had a good solid foundation."

Middlebrook worked under Rosanna Loach for a year. The 24-year-old former policeman learned a lot.

"I learned everything from her,” Middlebrook said flatly. "Enough to start my own company, which I told her about the day that she was going to hire me. I had told her that my intent is to go into my own business. And she said, 'Well, she might be ready to sell it, but she wasn't sure about the year time frame. After a year I said, 'I'm ready to do my thing.' And she said, 'Well, I'm going to go ahead and stay in business and look for another person to run the office.' And I said, ‘Understandable.' And that happened for maybe two years longer. And that broker ended up leaving. She closed her doors and then turned everything over to me that she had in her office building, and gave me all her files going back. Which was really nice of her to do that, of course. And I didn't have to pay for anything. She wanted me to continue on and, you know, keeping Doc Loach out in the forefront, which that's the biggest thing, you get forgotten after the years go by and people don't realize who you are after a generation or two. And she was happy with how I had done my business working with her co-brokering deals and listing properties and selling hers and vice versa. And so it worked out well in the end. She had a difficult time letting go because she was just that type of person and she wasn't in the limelight anymore. But then it was a couple of years after that, she started deteriorating and ended up having to go to a nursing home.”

Rosanna Loach died in 1996 at 80.