In the beginning, Sombrero Country Club was a tangled watery mangrove swamp- much like the virginal landscape one can find on Boot Key today.

A man named Stanley Switlik in 1952 visited this area on a trip from Naples, Florida to the Dry Tortugas. Stanley, originally an immigrant Polish boy from the Ukraine and later an industrialist who manufactured parachutes and other life saving equipment in Trenton, New Jersey, ran across a group of other men who were looking over this land. He fell into conversation with them and found they planned to build houses in the area in conjunction with the Atlantic Dredge Company. Mr. Switlik was not too impressed with this idea, thinking the acreage could be put to better uses. They told him if that was what he thought, why didn’t he go ahead and buy the land and do with it what he pleased.

So he did.

On the spot- so the story goes- he made a deal to purchase it

It then included some very wet acres.  Legend has it that he signed the check for the deposit on the fender of a handy parked car.

However that may be, Mr. Switlik eventually bought several large tracts of land including 200 acres on Crawl Cay, where he built his home. Over 300 acres were purchased from the Jesston Corporation for a figure near $200,000 according to Marathon Realtor, Romer L. Baucum. The sale of this land was featured in the first issue of the Florida Keynoter, Published February 19, 1953

The tracts Mr. Switlik acquired would be considered vast by today’s standards in the Keys. They comprised almost everything from where the Marine Bank of Monroe County now stands to Sombrero Beach on Sisters Creek. It did not, however include Tingler Island properties and the adjacent areas except for the site of the present Marathon High School, which Mr. Switlik was to donate to the county. This area today is prime cut of Vaca Key. Folk now refer to it as “ Sombrero” after the lighthouse that

 was erected on the reef before the Civil War.

Mr. Switlik pondered the use to which he would put his land. He believed that there were four things of principle importance to the tiny, post- Florida East Coast Railroad town of Marathon. The four most needed were: a bank, a hospital, a high school and a country club.