What's in a Name (on Sanibel)? Bailey Legacy Will Live on in Many Ways.....

The obit was simply stated: "Francis P. Bailey, Jr., the remaining son of a pioneering Sanibel family that opened Bailey's General Store in 1899, died Saturday. He was 92."

But there was huge chunk of Sanibel history that was highlighted that day, June 8, as well.

Those who know and love the Island, are most familiar with the name of Bailey because of the supermarket established in his name, but the history of Sanibel was so tied into the life of Francis Bailey that a memory lane for the man is also one for the Island.

Bailey's  father moved to Sanibel at the age of 24, when land in our tropical paradise was only a few cents more than dirt-cheap. Though he was born only a few miles away in Ft. Myers, Francis Bailey was nearly a lifelong citizen of the island. Except for a few years in prep school, four years at Hampden-Sydney, and a stint in the Army, Bailey had lived his entire life on the island.

And he saw it in the best and worst of times.  Looking back, Bailey stated about his life on Sanibel:   “We had eight grades in one room, one teacher, one front door, one stove, one pencil sharpener, but we had two two-hole outhouses.”After the “snow birds” left Sanibel for the summer, the Baileys remained. Of course, there was no air conditioning and the hot, muggy weather was perfect for breeding mosquitoes “that were so thick you could take a quart can and swing it above your head and get a gallon of mosquitoes.”Escaping the mosquitoes was a constant struggle. Bailey says, “We had smudge pots and you always brushed off the screen door before we came in and were careful not to leave it open. Threaten to shoot the dog if he pushed it open. If you had to go some place in the evenin’, you’d get everybody all set together and run to the car and drive down the road with the doors open.”Despite being only a ferry ride away from Ft. Myers, Sanibel Island might as well have been on another planet. “We had no paved roads, no sidewalks, no drug store, no furniture store, no barber, no beauty shop, no movie theater. It was just here. Nobody felt deprived. That’s what we had.

Bailey’s General Store was along the shoreline where locals—and the many vacationers—disembarked from the ferry. A stop at Bailey’s store was one of the first things visitors would do, which proved to be relatively lucrative for the family. As the island grew, the store also grew. They enlarged it by closing in a porch. Later, the Baileys built a new Standard Oil station on the island along Periwinkle Way, which had become Sanibel’s main thoroughfare. The island, though only a few miles from Ft. Myers, was still remote and in a perpetual state of recovery from hurricanes.

Everything changed in 1963—on May 23 to be precise. That was the day the bridge connecting Sanibel to the mainland opened to traffic.

“At the time, Bailey said once in an interview, "I thought it would instantly change the island radically. It took two or three years for us to notice any big change. The island was growing—or regressing, depending on how you looked at it—anyway, but it was two or three years before we noticed any appreciable spurt. I think some of the real estate speculators started saying, ‘Hmm. It looks pretty good over there’.”

The beginning of the bridge was the end of the mail boat, which put Bailey’s General Store at the end of a dead-end road. Three years later, in 1966, the family moved the store to its current location on Periwinkle Way. The store also grew substantially. During the last 45 years, the store has evolved and now offers a wide variety of products, from baked goods and fresh vegetables to hammers.