In a small town in the gentle rolling hills of central Florida, a large bronze plaque affixed to an old brick building offers visitors a glimpse into the village’s past. The building, the plaque notes, once housed the Florida Cattleman’s Association, where cattle were rounded up during the Civil War to be railed north to feed hungry Confederate troops.

A short walk down main street on a pockmarked sidewalk stands the old telegraph office building, a testament to the days when news traveled a great deal slower. A few doors along, there’s a fading sign advertising an antique profession —“M. Morse Gunsmith.”

For history buffs, it would be a wonderful window on old Florida … if only it were true.

Sure enough, central Florida has been cattle country almost since Europeans settled it hundreds of years ago. And, true, beef from the area fed soldiers during the War Between the States. But the history reflected on the plaque is fiction, the invention of a developer. The downtown buildings, built just six years ago, have been cosmetically aged. The sidewalk was deliberately pockmarked. M. Morse Gunsmith? That’s the fictional alter ego of Mark Morse, son of H. Gary Morse, who, along with his family, is developing the community known as The Villages.

There’s nothing artificial about The Villages’ success. Located an equal distance between Ocala and Leesburg, The Villages is one of Florida’s fastest-growing retirement communities. Spanning three counties — Lake, Sumter and Marion — The Villages is a behemoth. With only a third of the 18,000-acre property developed, there are 27,000 residents. Five thousand people work directly for The Villages or for businesses in the sprawling community, which has its own chamber of commerce. There are 171 holes of golf. A 60-bed, full-service hospital is under construction.

On average, 10 new residents move to the community each day. Last year, The Villages sold 1,776 homes, an increase of 15% over the previous year. When it’s built out sometime around 2020, The Villages will be home to 100,000 residents and will employ some 25,000 workers.

The draw for many of the Midwesterners who buy homes at The Villages is the mix of temperate weather and the community’s re-creation in Florida of all the amenities of their small-town lives, including a huge range of activities. Offerings include the standard fare — golf, swimming, softball leagues, bowling, theater and music — along with a massive smorgasbord of classes and a club for every hobby under the sun, from quilting and fly-fishing to chess and Republican politics. “We’re not necessarily selling homes,” Morse says. “We’re selling happiness.”

Seniors zip around the picture-perfect downtown in golf carts, many of which are festooned with college pennants and old license plates from the residents’ previous homes in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.

Others sit at outdoor cafes, munching lunch or reading the paper. Every evening, people gather at the town square for live entertainment. “We looked at all of the other retirement places,” says Betty Ruth Leech, who along with her husband, Jim, moved to The Villages 61¼2 years ago from Michigan. The Villages “has everything — grocery stores, shopping, entertainment and every club imaginable.”

To help reinforce the small-town feel, The Villages publishes its own daily newspaper (the Villages Daily Sun) and operates both a television station (Village News Network, or VNN, which appears on cable) and radio station (WVLG 640 AM).

Phil Markward, a former newspaper manager from Indiana, is director of The Villages Media Group. He says his group gives Villages residents a respectable mix of state and national news, along with heavy coverage of most of the “local” goings-on and event schedules.

Call it comfort news: For example, a TV crew and a reporter from the paper recently turned out for the quilting club’s presentation of a $500 check to a local Boy Scout troop. Are there corporate constraints on what to cover? Not at all, Markward insists. Still, when referring to The Villages in articles, the newspaper doesn’t fail to mention that the development is “the nation’s premiere retirement community.”

It may hardly be stop-the-presses news, but the approach meets its goal of reaching the community: The newspaper’s penetration rate? Some 92% of The Villages’ residents buy the paper, which has a circulation of 19,500. Over lunch at his company’s private dining room, Gary Morse, the driving force behind The Villages, nervously fingers a glass of red wine. Dressed in an open-collared, short-sleeved white shirt, blue jeans and off-white cowboy boots, Morse is an extremely shy man who is several minutes into the interview before he’s comfortable enough to look directly at a visitor.

Morse, 64, worked in advertising — mostly direct mail solicitations — in Chicago before becoming a retirement community developer. In 1982, his father, Harold Schwartz, asked Morse to help turn around a struggling trailer park he owned in Florida. (Morse’s parents divorced when he was a child. He took his stepfather’s last name because his mother was afraid the Germans would invade
the U.S. during World War II and persecute Jews.)

In the early 1980s, Schwartz and his son had sold about 400 trailers and were running out of land. They were making enough money to begin upgrading the property and buying adjoining cattle farms for development. Schwartz, who now lives in The Villages but is not active in the business, had a vision of building not so much a retirement community, but a retirement “hometown.”

That meant developing a downtown area and expanding their offerings to include a mix of both modest and higher-priced homes. By 1991, they changed the name to The Villages to reflect the growing number of neighborhoods that would make up the overall community.

Unlike most retirement communities, The Villages offers a wide range of home prices, from $65,000 to $650,000. “As we developed the high end, we never lost the low end,” Morse says. “We have to build 27 new holes of golf each year to keep up with demand” posed by the influx of new residents, he says.

After a decade of steady growth, The Villages also outgrew the limited lending capabilities of local banks, which had been providing financing. In the mid-1990s, Morse turned to a relatively new form of financing called Community Development Districts. CDDs are special-purpose local governments. They are structured in such a way that developers like Morse control the CDD board for the first six years, gradually turning over control to homeowners.

A CDD allows a developer to issue low-interest-rate bonds. The proceeds are used to build infrastructure such as roads, water and sewer lines and community amenities like a clubhouse. The bonds are repaid by assessments on homeowners. Without the CDD financing, Morse says, The Villages could not have expanded as fast as it has.

After nearly 20 years of focusing primarily on development, Morse is now spreading his wings a bit. Through his friend Al Hoffman, another Florida community developer and finance chairman of the national Republican Party, Morse has gotten involved in politics. He contributed to the campaigns of George W. Bush and Gov. Jeb Bush, who named Morse to the Council of 100. “I thought, finally, we’ll have someone up there who understands what we developers go through,” Morse says of Bush, a developer himself.

On the last vacant parcel abutting The Villages town square, construction crews are busy completing a new sales center and retail complex that will likely feature their own historical markers.

According to Gary Lester, The Villages’ vice president for community relations and president of its chamber of commerce, the new building will probably be assigned a colorful history as an old hotel where someone like Mark Twain once stayed. Twain might well be amused.

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THE VILLAGES
Location: Spans 3 counties in central Florida: Citrus, Marion and Sumter.
Acres: 6,000 developed, 18,000 total.
Residents: 27,000 — no age restrictions, but children are prohibited from living in the community.
Home prices: $65,000 to $650,000.
Restaurants: 16.
Theater screens: 8.
Pools: 13.
Tennis courts: 28.
Bowling lanes: 64.
Golf: 3 PGA-rated championship courses; 9 executive courses; 2 driving ranges. A Nancy Lopez-designed 18-hole course is expected to open in November.
Hotels: 1 (La Hacienda).
Media: Newspaper — The Villages Daily Sun, circulation 19,500; Television — Village News Network; and radio station — WVLG 640 AM.
Churches: 3 — Church on The Square, interdenominational and Episcopalian; St. Timothy’s, Catholic; and The Chapel of All Faiths.

See September 2001 issue of Florida Trend Magazine for original article.