Gordon J. Barnett, fernery grower and developer of Fern Park Estates, wanted to lure the people on the cusp of wealth. To fashion the bait, he designed a near-elitist atmosphere that blended a leisurely country atmosphere with the degree of city culture. Then he sweetened his pitch with a glossy brochure full of flowery prose and the promise of easy money. What he saw in Hibbard in 1926 was not a customer, but someone with all the attributes he wanted in an exclusive sales agent – he could move easily about in the social circle of the wealthy and elite.

Hibbard eagerly absorbed the bait. Barnett explained how he had given up the maddening life of time clocks five years earlier and been “lured by the indolent life of the tropics, abandoned the hurly-burly of New York City, and set his face southward. After drifting about the tropical islands of the Caribbean, he gravitated to Florida ... His good sense was almost immediately rewarded by his falling into a surprisingly profitable business, peculiar to Florida, and one which contained the very elements he had been seeking. He found a business unheard of in the North from which a livelihood could be obtained with the slightest effort…”

Hibbard could tell good marketing, if nothing else, and Barnett certainly drew a poetic picture. In his brochure, Barnett wrote, “It is needless to say that a man of Mr. Barnett's artistic temperament would be as poor an agriculturalist as a ploughboy would be a banker; only a self-grown article such as tropical ferns, requiring neither cultivating nor replanting, could have intrigued his fancy. He could neither plow nor harrow, till nor spin, but he found profit and pleasure in this unique activity... Here at last was the way whereby men of creative mind, with knowledge of neither soil nor agricultural, and with absolutely no inclination toward `dirt farming' or physical labor, could find that basic essential to his leisure, essential to artistic opportunity - care-free self-support.”

As Hibbard read on, Barnett laid on another touch of magic, saying he was carrying out a colonization plan dear to his heart. The word colonization made the effort sound historic, like founding the country, or at least Winnetka or Winter Park. Next came the gilded lure:

“There never has been a group of men and women more deserving of that precious leisure-time for accomplishment than the artists, writers, poets, thinkers, composers, litterateur - those who have a message for society which must be expressed - must be released from those pressing duties involved in the struggle for existence. There are many such dreamers of dreams, who yearn for artistic growth and expression. In fact, there are few men of creative temperament who, when freed from the struggle for existence, would not show hidden values undreamed of by all but themselves, yes, even unsuspected by their own friends and families.”

Accordingly, Barnett wrote, the real world stifled artist and educators, whose noble works were set aside in order to make a living. In his utopian subdivision, they could “not only realize their artistic dreams, but could also find a market for their creative productions in a more lucrative way than they now do, while leashed to the grindstone of necessity.”