Sarah Bailey during the Saving Julington-Durbin Creek Peninsula Celebration in 2018. | Bailey Family
Published on June 26, 2026 at 12:09 pm
Free local news and info, in your inbox at 6 a.m. M-F. Sign up for the Jacksonville Today newsletter.
Sarah Bailey has been called St. Johns County’s environmental conscience, saving sea turtles, setting up a bird sanctuary and always championing the environment in Florida and beyond as a private citizen and a county commissioner .
Now she is celebrating her 100th birthday on Friday as family and friends remember her decades of volunteer work to create a healthy, clean and abundant environment in Florida.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
Born on a Kentucky farm, Bailey’s desire to protect nature matured as she grew, leading to work with land trusts and programs to preserve sites like the Julington-Durbin Creek Peninsula and Big and Little Talbot Island.
As she said in 2018 in a Florida Fish and Wildlife News story, she came to a realization after years of trail riding all over Florida, rising livestock and Quarter Horses, and preserving their ranch in St. Johns County by creating a special trust with the University of Florida Foundation.
“I came to see how important it is to save land,” Bailey said. “We saw the devastation of South Florida wetlands and what it was doing to our native plants and wildlife.”
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
Shorty Robbins worked on many projects with Bailey as a planner at Jacksonville’s Recreation Department from 1997 to 2001, then at the St Johns County Parks and Recreation to 2006. Now back in St. Johns County’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Robbins said she sees Bailey’s “fingerprints are on everything” as she reviews old documents on new projects, calling her friend a true example of “Old Florida.”
“I’m working on a historic home acquisition; she did the original work for the Florida Master Site file,” Robbins said. “Her name is on some of the history of that — it is like everywhere you turn. We joke about the reason we still have trees in Northwest St. Johns County is because Sarah Bailey made sure of it as part of land planning and during her work on the county commission. She made sure that we had protections on trees.”
Bailey was an art director in New York City as a young woman and married her late husband, John Matthews Bailey, in 1950. He had graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in animal husbandry, so they both set up a cattle operation in Arkansas. In 1952, they moved to Florida, where her husband worked on a 170,000-acre ranch and trained as a herdsman.
By 1960, the couple and their three children bought a 63-acre ranch in Fruit Cove, calling it “The Needmore,” and she began teaching as her husband worked for the Department of Agriculture.
Eventually, Sarah Bailey began looking into environmental issues, saying in a 1991 Folio Weekly story that she began working on an endangered land program, then the state Division of Forestry, where she said she began to get a feel for the political complexities of the environmental movement.
In 1984, she ran for a seat on the St. Johns County Commission, telling Folio that “there was a need for someone with an environmental background to speak up for the land.” She was on the commission from 1984 to 1992, as well as the Northeast Florida Planning Council, Florida Association of Counties and numerous other natural resources and environmental boards or councils.
During those years, Bailey and her husband would also take part in some of the Great Florida Cattle Drives, a living-history reenactment that recreates the epic 80-mile, multiday cattle treks across the state by 9th-century pioneers.
Bailey was inducted into the Florida Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Hall of Fame in 1999, after being named Woman of the Outdoors by the Gateway Girl Scout Council after decades of hosting hundreds of girls at two-week day camps at The Needmore’s 70-acre spread.
Robbins lives on the ranch land, still operated by the Bailey family.
“It started off as a cattle operation when they first moved there in the 1960s, and it has morphed into hobby cattle. They have 40 head of Cracker Cattle now,” Robbins said. “They also board horses for the community and have an equine therapy program and quite number of horse of their own.”
Bailey was the Mandarin Community Club’s Miss Aggie Award recipient for 2016, in part for her advocacy to protect land around Julington Creek and Mandarin as a commissioner and environmental boards. In 2020, she received the Fellow Man and Mother Earth Award from The Stetson Kennedy Foundation.
