In the early days, the area east of what is now A1A that we know as Ponte Vedra Beach had a different name. The area was called Mineral City. Two men named Buckman and Pritchard had purchased 17 miles of the beach around 1914. They wanted the land not because of the beach itself, but for the valuable metals in the sand. Rutile and Ilmenite were used in the manufacture of titanium and zirconium and our beach had plenty of both. They essentially sifted through the sand extracting the precious metals. To this day, some locals walk the beach head down searching for flecks of the valuable blue metals. The name Mineral City came about as a result of a naming contest held for the employees of Buckman & Pritchard. The winning entrant received $50.
Buckman and Pritchard sold their interest to the National Lead Company in 1921. About seven years later, National Lead decided to build a golf course and a resort for their employees and began construction on what would ultimately become the Ponte Vedra Club. A 12-bedroom log cabin was built to act as a clubhouse and a nine-hole golf course was laid out by PGA co-founder Herbert Bertram Strong. Roy Landrum Sr., father of the local sheriff and father-in-law of Alice B. Landrum who has a school named after her, acted as superintendent of construction and groundskeeper.
Around 1929, National Lead lost interest in the project and hired the firm of Stockton, Whatley, Davin, & Co. to act as developer and operator. The new developers decided that Mineral City was not a good name for a luxury resort and decided to rename the area something that sounded a little more upscale. They looked at a map of northwestern Spain and settled on the name Ponte Vedra. The name comes from a city in the Galician region of Spain and it means “old bridge” in Galic. Some presume that Ponte Vedra means green point or even green bridge. It does not. The city of Pontevedra in Galicia, just north of Portugal, is the capital of the province of Galicia and is built on the site of an ancient Roman bridge.
The Telfair Stockton company acquired the resort in the ’30s and continued to operate it until it was sold to Gate Petroleum in the 1980s. Obviously, the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club still attracts tourists and visitors today. I have to wonder if the property and the area would have been quite as successful if it had retained the original name?
Scott A. Grant is a local author and historian. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com.
