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Clewiston's Namesake Would Favor Restoration, Grandson Says

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By PHILIP MORGAN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 20, 2008

TAMPA - The state's plan to buy 187,000 acres from U.S. Sugar Corp. worries the residents of Clewiston, whose town near Lake Okeechobee grew up with the sugar industry and is threatened by the loss of its main industry.

But the late Alonzo Clewis, the Tampa businessman who helped establish the town, would have been in favor of the state's Everglades restoration effort. His grandson believes.

"He would have been all for it," says G. Blaine Howell, 81, of Tampa, explaining that Clewis would have been dismayed over the decades of damage to the Everglades. "He loved the land."

Though he made a fortune as a banker, Clewis loved farming. He became intrigued when he heard that rich farmland was available southwest of the lake at a place called Sand Point. According to family lore, he saw Seminoles growing sugar cane and figured they knew best what would grow in the area.

Clewis sold thousands of acres to a group that would become the U.S. Sugar Corp.

In 1919, Marian Horowitz O'Brien, a wealthy developer and the first mayor of Moore Haven, approached Clewis with a plan to create a town. O'Brien, her husband, and Clewis formed a company to develop Sand Point and another company to bring the railroad from Moore Haven. The first locomotive arrived in the newly named Clewiston on Labor Day 1921.

At that time, Clewis was president of Exchange Bank of Tampa. Born in Georgia in 1864 and orphaned at age 12, he came to Tampa in 1888 and worked for a real estate abstract company. In 1890, he started an insurance agency. A few years later, he bought two abstract companies and merged them into Tampa Abstract Co. He also founded Tampa Building and Loan Association.

Among his acquisitions was Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Howell says that when someone asked him why he bought a cemetery, he answered, "There are two things in life that are certain, death and taxes, and I haven't figured out how to tax people."

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