Dunedin passed its first law in 1899 to deal with pigs. The town had just incorporated, and the actual reason it bothered was to get the legal authority to ban hogs from roaming the streets — a problem serious enough that it’s the reason city government here exists at all.
The Scottish name wasn’t an accident
Richard L. Garrison got the first land grant here in 1850, and the settlement was originally called Jonesboro after mercantile owner George Jones. Two Scottish immigrants, J.O. Douglas and James Somerville, renamed it Dunedin — from “Dùn Èideann,” the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh. It wasn’t a one-off gesture. Dunedin still has a sister-city relationship with Stirling, Scotland, the Dunedin Highland Games run every year, and both Dunedin High School and Highland Middle School field competition-level pipe and drum bands. A Florida beach town’s marching band plays bagpipes because two 19th-century Scottish merchants got to pick the name.
What’s still standing from that era
Andrews Memorial Chapel dates to 1888, the J.O. Douglas House — the same Douglas who renamed the town — to 1880, and the Willis S. Blatchley House to 1916. The Fenway Hotel on Edgewater Drive has been through several eras since it opened and has hosted its share of famous guests over the decades.
Baseball and beaches
The Toronto Blue Jays have run spring training out of Dunedin since 1977, and the minor-league Dunedin Blue Jays play here the rest of the year. In 2021, COVID-era restrictions actually pushed the major-league team to play home games in Dunedin instead of Toronto — a small Florida spring-training town filling in for an entire MLB season.
The causeway out of downtown leads to Honeymoon Island and, by ferry, Caladesi Island State Park — both routinely ranked among the best beaches in the country, and both a more low-key alternative to Clearwater Beach a few miles south.
Good to know
Dunedin is on the Pinellas County coast, just north of Clearwater. The 2020 census counted 36,068 residents. Livestock is still banned within city limits — the 127-year-old law never got repealed.
For the beach comparison, there’s what makes Clearwater Beach one of the best in the country, and for everything else on the calendar, what’s on across Tampa Bay this August.
Photo: Ebyabe, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.