The Wells Era

The Wells Family: Owners of Cabbage Key since 1976

When Robert "Rob" Wells Jr. and his wife, Phyllis, purchased Cabbage Key in 1976, they weren't seasoned hoteliers or wealthy resort developers. Rob was Director of Admissions at High Point College in North Carolina, Phyllis was an elementary-school teacher, and they had a young son. They left the security of those careers and moved their family to an isolated island in Pine Island Sound accessible only by boat.

It was an enormous gamble.

Cabbage Key already had a colorful history, an inn, restaurant and the beginnings of its famous dollar-bill tradition, but it was hardly a conventional money-making resort. There were no cars or paved roads, no utility electricity and no regular telephone service. Generators supplied power and a ship-to-shore radio provided a connection with the outside world.

The Wells didn't try to turn Cabbage Key into something it wasn't. Instead, they recognized that its isolation, history and informality were precisely what made it valuable.

Rob became the highly visible face of the island while Phyllis handled much of the business behind the scenes. Their son Rob Wells III later remembered that his mother "ran the whole back office." Together they built the operation slowly, through long hours, personal service and an attention to guests that made Cabbage Key feel less like a resort and more like a place visitors had discovered for themselves.

By February 1979, only three years after their arrival, the Island Reporter was describing Cabbage Key as a "haunt of millionaires and mullet fishermen." The island didn't even advertise. Its reputation traveled largely by word of mouth, attracting everyone from local fishermen and recreational boaters to celebrities.

Electricity finally reached the island in 1981, eliminating the unreliable generators that had defined the Wells family's earliest years. Yet modernization never became an excuse to modernize away Cabbage Key's character.

That restraint may be the Wells family's greatest accomplishment.

Over nearly five decades, Rob and Phyllis improved the business while carefully preserving the historic buildings, natural landscape and unpretentious atmosphere that made the island special. They eventually helped secure historic recognition for Cabbage Key and expanded the family business with the restoration and reopening of Tarpon Lodge on Pine Island.

Their sons, Rob and Ken, grew up working on the island and eventually joined the family business, carrying Cabbage Key into a second generation.

Rob Wells once summarized the family's philosophy perfectly: visitors occasionally told him how much they loved Cabbage Key—and then suggested ways to improve it.

His answer was simple: "We have no intention of changing it."

That philosophy transformed an improbable island business into something far more valuable: a piece of Old Florida that survived because one family understood that progress sometimes means knowing what not to change.