By Wall Street Journal
Financier John Donahue was flying above Naples, Fla., in the 1980s when, according to family lore, he spotted an uninhabited piece of land along the Gulf of Mexico. He pointed to the tip of a peninsula known as Gordon Pointe and told his wife, Rhodora Donahue, “I want to go there.”
That’s just what he did, paying $1 million in 1985 for a roughly 4.3-acre parcel with nothing on it but a small fishing cottage surrounded by mangroves.