LAND O'LAKES S.C. "Bud" Bexley, Jr., a Pasco County ranching pioneer and one of the area's most prominent landowners, died Tuesday (Dec. 2, 2003) after a long illness. Passionate about his rural lifestyle and prickly about his property rights, Mr. Bexley lived most of his 73 years on the edge of his family's 15,000 acres west of U.S. 41. "He was a man of no pretense. What you saw is what you got," said Derrill McAteer, a Hernando County rancher who was Mr. Bexley's close friend and business partner. He was born Solon Cousins Bexley on Feb. 20, 1930, but often abbreviated his name with his first two initials. Mr. Bexley's father bought what were mostly vast tracts of palmetto thicket in Land O'Lakes in 1949. The son was given much of the job of turning the land into productive pasture. Mr. Bexley graduated from the University of Florida, attended law school for a year, but dropped his legal studies to pursue ranching after his father's death in the 1950s. For 50 years, it remained his profession. "He loved the land. I think cows were a way to have the land," McAteer said. By the 1990s, Mr. Bexley faced a problem typical of ranchers on the outskirts of a booming metropolis: The development value of his land dwarfed the value of the cattle. Mr. Bexley bided his time before signing a contract. He settled last year on Newland Communities, in part because he felt the developer would save much of the ranch's natural beauty in building what could be 7,000 homes. "Making it a quality project is of the utmost importance to me," he told the St. Petersburg Times last summer. Still, he mourned the passing of the ranching life, epitomized by such Pasco families as the Cannons, Mitchells, Conners, Starkeys and Porters. Most have already sold to developers. Jay B. Starkey, Jr., head of another ranching dynasty, shared a long boundary with Bexley before their properties were split by the four lanes of the Suncoast Parkway. Each family owned more than 10,000 acres of west-central Pasco cattle country. They split the cost of fencing their land. They captured each other's loose herds. "We were neighbors even though we lived 20 miles apart," Starkey said. Mr. Bexley loved the trees, fields and streams of his ranch. One 500-year-old oak, which he discovered as a young man chasing an escaped cow through a forest, bears his name: Bud's Tree. But he tolerated little opposition from environmental activists, whom he saw as poking in his business. Irksome were the Sierra Club types who delayed construction of a highway called the Ridge Road extension over his family land. "I don't waste my time with people like that," Mr. Bexley told the Times. 'They own nothing, have nothing and all they can do is run their mouths." He was no great fan of the U.S. tax system either, once calling the inheritance tax "worse than theft." "He was kind of opinionated. He was kind of crusty. Whatever was on his mind he'd say it," Starkey said. He leaves behind his wife, Patricia, three sons and seven grandchildren. True to his modest rancher's lifestyle, Mr. Bexley requested burial somewhere on his beloved land, watered by the first trickles of the Anclote River. "His wealth meant very little to him," McAteer said. "Never, ever did he display it in any shape or form.".

Tampa Bay Times - 4 Dec 2003, Thu

h/o Patricia (Bailey) Bexley m1951 (1931-2003)
s/o Solon Cousins, Sr. and Ruth Angeline (Phillips) Bexley
children:
Clyde Solon Bexley
Craig Linton Bexley (1954-2012)
Patrick Bryant Bexley (1959-2009)