After having watched from a distance the construction over nearly three years, the press marveled at the electric and gas lights that illuminated the building at night, the steam heat, and the hot and cold water in every room. New Edzell opened formally with a reception on February 17, 1914. This was the ideal setting for her "palace." In a letter written from Sarasota, she described in detail the birds, fish and vegetation that could be seen on the approach to Bird Key. Testimonials and memorials published after her death provide a romantic view of the woman who did not live to see the completion of her husband's "labor of love."įriends in Kentucky and Ohio remembered her devotion to philanthropic endeavors such as the Ohio Humane Society, and the Home of the Friendless and Foundling. Thomas Worcester had purchased the 12 acre island in 1906, and they had come to winter in Sarasota several seasons before beginning construction. It was named New Edzell Castle after the ancestral home, Edzell Castle of his wife, Davie Lindsay Worcester, of Scotland. Worcester built the first expensive home on any island in the Sarasota Bay region. In 1911, Thomas Martin Worcester of Cincinnati began to build on the key by dredging a channel through the grass flats to his dock and using the dredged material as fill to raise the level of the land. At the beginning of the last century, Bird Key was a small island in Sarasota Bay, rising only a few feet about the surrounding shallow grass flats.
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