About Dunedin

In 1850, Richard L. Garrison took the first land grant in what was then called Jonesboro, named after the man who ran the local mercantile. It was a small coastal settlement, unremarkable by Florida standards. That changed in 1885 when two Scottish merchants, John O. Douglas and James Somerville, arrived from Edinburgh, opened a store, and petitioned for the area's first post office in northern Pinellas County. They renamed the place Dunedin. Scottish Gaelic for Edinburgh. It means "fort on the hill."

The Orange Belt Railway showed up in 1888. First railroad in Pinellas County. It connected central Florida to St. Petersburg and turned Dunedin into one of the state's chief seaports. A dock went in to handle larger sailing vessels, and at one point Dunedin had the largest fleet of sailing ships in all of Florida. A settlement that had been renamed by two shopkeepers three years earlier was now moving cargo up and down the Gulf Coast.

The town incorporated in 1899, and the reason is worth knowing. Pigs. Residents were tired of livestock running through the streets, so they formed a government primarily to ban them. That livestock ban is still on the books. The community reincorporated as the City of Dunedin in 1926, by which point citrus farming had brought steady prosperity and the Scottish identity had taken root deep enough to outlast every trend that followed.

What followed was a series of choices that most Florida towns refused to make. Dunedin banned large commercial signage downtown. Kept corporate chains out by city policy. The result, built over decades, is a Main Street where every business is locally owned and the Gulf is visible from one end. Most Florida downtowns look interchangeable. Dunedin decided that was worse than leaving money on the table.

In 1977, the Toronto Blue Jays chose Dunedin for spring training. They're still here. TD Ballpark on Douglas Avenue hosts major league games every February and March, plus the class-A Dunedin Blue Jays of the Florida State League the rest of the season. Canadian accents fill the sidewalks for two months every year. Families who made the trip in the '80s now bring grandchildren.

The Highland Games have been running for 57 years. Pipe bands, caber tosses, Highland dancing. The festival hasn't missed a year, and it hasn't needed a corporate sponsor to keep going. The Pinellas Trail, 47 miles of paved multi-use path, cuts through the center of downtown and connects Dunedin to communities across the county. Cyclists treat it like a highway between restaurants.

A town named by two Scottish merchants in 1885 that still sounds like them, still keeps the chains out, and still drops everything for bagpipes once a year. Most places would have sold that identity off decades ago. Dunedin kept it.

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