To get to Bannon Island, you leave your car behind.
There’s no bridge, no causeway, no road. The only way onto the 24-acre island in the middle of Polk County’s Lake Marion is by boat — or, if you’re feeling extravagant, by seaplane or helicopter. Waiting on the other side of the water is something that feels less like a house and more like a castle with a moat.
When people ask Dr. Patrick O’Leary what it feels like to have a moat around your castle filled with alligators, he says, laughing, “I’d say — just as it should be.” O’Leary’s family has held this island for roughly 150 years. Now, for the first time in more than a century, it’s for sale, listed at $12 million.
The compound pairs a restored historic residence with a strikingly modern addition — an octagon of glass walls that opens to 360-degree views. There is a “floating” office with a transparent floor, suspended on cables tied into the trusses just outside the master bedroom. The octagon is no accident: the original home, built in the late 1800s, was designed around an octagonal center too.
The listing describes seven bedrooms, ten baths, and nearly 8,000 square feet of living space across the property in several structures. The main addition was built in 2003 from reclaimed cypress milled in the 1800s. It’s represented by Lisa Kleine of Red Bird Realty.
But the island’s real value is its history. The land’s first known resident wasn’t a Bannon at all — it was Echo Emathla Chipco, the Creek-Seminole leader known as Chief Chipco. The old story says he kept a camp here into the 1880s. Chipco spent his life resisting removal and evading capture across Central Florida, and by the end of the Seminole Wars, led one of the last bands remaining in the state.
As the O’Leary family tells it, the island passed to Patrick Bannon — an Irish-born Catholic carpenter from New York — after Bannon befriended the Native Americans living on the land and warned them vigilantes were coming. Before they left, the family says the land changed hands, “We don’t know how much,” O’Leary says. “Someone once wrote it was a dollar twenty-five an acre. I have no way of validating that.”
Bannon was no ordinary craftsman. By some accounts he was skilled enough that Thomas Edison recruited him to build phonograph cabinets. Instead, after a bout of pneumonia, he headed south, hand-building a home on the island with a classroom inside to school his six children. In 1895, that home hosted what’s been described as Polk County’s first Catholic Mass.
A century and a half later, the family is ready to let go, “My children don’t seem to be terribly interested, or they can’t afford to keep it,” O’Leary says. “So we’re going to sell it.”
Standing on land his family has held since the 1800s, O’Leary admits the sale sits heavy.
“It still concerns me that I’m the one who’s going to relinquish it,” he says. A hundred and fifty years, he’s reminded, is a good run. “Yes,” he says. “It is.”