The Healthiest Spot on Earth - Freedom Magazine Presents The History of Clearwater Part II

Tourism Gets a Start

Tourism was in its primary stages in Florida when M.C. Dwight arrived and built Clearwater’s first hotel, the Orange View, in 1880. It was located on the current site of the Peace Memorial Presbyterian Church.

With the construction of this hotel, tourists began to trickle into the community. Then, in 1885, a Baltimore physician, Dr. Van Bibber, reported in a medical journal that Clearwater was “the healthiest spot on earth.” This further helped tourism and a second hotel was built. A famous sculptor from Russia, Theodore Kamensky, built the Sea View Hotel on the bluff in what is presently downtown Clearwater.

A historic development for the area was the coming of the railroad.

Peter A. Demens, an enterprising Russian immigrant, was the major figure in getting the railroad brought to Clearwater and the Pinellas peninsula. Demens was determined to get the railroad through Clearwater and to its St. Petersburg terminus. The railroad got as far as Tarpon Springs, north of Clearwater, when the project ran out of money.

Demens wined and dined two financiers, H.O. Armour of Chicago and A.J. Drexel of Philadelphia, in private railroad cars, whisking them by makeshift, Hollywood-style sets at dusk that had been hastily erected to create the illusion of prosperous communities.