Riomar — Vero Beach, Florida

Riomar is the oldest neighborhood on the Vero Beach barrier island, a district of winding lanes and old oaks inside the City of Vero Beach, built around the Riomar Country Club golf course near the Atlantic. Indian River Magazine states plainly that development of the barrier island began with Riomar, a winter colony for wealthy midwesterners.

The club and the neighborhood share a founding year. According to a June 2019 report in Vero News, Riomar Country Club had its genesis in 1919, the same year the City of Vero was incorporated, and the club occupies 110 acres fronting the Atlantic. Today it is a private, member-owned club. This page covers the neighborhood's public history and civic facts; it does not describe individual homes, owners or sale prices.

Three men from Cleveland started it. Vero News reported in 2019 that Riomar's founders were Cleveland residents Dr. W.H. Humiston, E.E. Strong and Dr. J.P. Sawyer, who were looking for a warmer place to spend their retirement years fishing and playing golf and chose Vero Beach for its climate. The golf course was designed by Herbert Strong, whose stated aim was to build natural beauty into every feature of play. Work began on the front nine in the spring of 1919 and was completed by year's end, and the report notes that the original boundaries and layout of the Riomar course are largely the same today.

The builder on the ground was Alex MacWilliam Sr. Indian River Magazine relates that MacWilliam, wounded in World War I and hospitalized in Cleveland, was persuaded by a group of doctors to go to Vero Beach and develop a winter resort. A 2012 profile in Vero Beach 32963 describes him as a landscape architect and decorated veteran who was put in touch with John Sawyer, an investor in a new winter golf resort called Riomar, and who oversaw construction of the golf course and then managed the club.

MacWilliam stayed. The same profile says his Irish-born wife and he had both come from Ohio to work at the club in Riomar, and that he ended up mayor of Vero Beach for 20 years. Among his accomplishments it lists setting up the first mosquito control district in Florida and, while in the Legislature, getting the state to set aside the land that is now Riverside Park for the City of Vero Beach. His son, Alex MacWilliam Jr., later assembled the land that became John's Island.

When Riomar began, the barrier island east of Vero had no road connection. Indian River Magazine describes the island as considered remote and inhospitable, choked with mosquitoes and reachable only by the hardiest people until the first bridge, a wooden structure with an S-curve in the middle, was built in 1920. MacWilliam moved to Vero in 1919, and because there was no bridge, workers, mules and building materials crossed the Indian River by barge. He built Riomar's first five cottages and the golf course.

Power came a decade later. Electricity reached mainland Vero in 1917, but the beachside was not lit until 1930. Indian River Magazine quotes a Press Journal report of Dec. 28, 1930, on a 1,700-foot, 3-ton cable laid beneath the Indian River Lagoon to bring power to the peninsula, which the paper said would provide much needed service at Riomar, the casino and Beachland Estates as those subdivisions grew. Riomar was the first subdivision the paper named when the island was wired.

Early Riomar families lived with that isolation. The 2012 Vero Beach 32963 profile recalls that MacWilliam's children were driven every morning across the wooden bridge to the public school on the mainland. Indian River Magazine adds that MacWilliam, as mayor and later state representative, was remembered by his family as always insisting on good zoning for Vero Beach.

The original Riomar Clubhouse is now a school building. A Florida historical marker erected in 1991 by the Division of Historical Resources records that the Riomar Club chose a site on Club Drive for its clubhouse, which was completed and opened in 1930. The marker describes a Spanish-design building in the style of Palm Beach, with a stucco exterior and interior pecky cypress beams, and calls it a center for social activities that drew many permanent residents and winter visitors to Vero Beach.

In 1965 the building was bought to start an independent school affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Saint Edward's School opened there with 33 students in grades 5 through 8, according to the marker. When the Upper School campus opened on A1A south of Riomar in 1972, the old clubhouse continued to hold the lower grades, and the building was renovated in 1988 with its exterior kept in its original character.

The country club built anew. In its centennial year, 2019, Riomar Country Club began remodeling its own single-story, 14,000-square-foot clubhouse, with the work expected to be finished by the late first quarter of 2020, Vero News reported. The club's general manager said the restoration was meant to match the look of Old Riomar residences, with a cupola and an open-air patio overlooking the golf course.

The older part of the neighborhood is often called Old Riomar. A January 2017 feature in Vero News described the historic Old Riomar neighborhood as having winding, sandy lanes and oak canopies, and recalled turning off Ocean Drive onto Sandfly Lane to find a large oak said to be 300 years old, one of many oaks that give the area its character. The same feature placed Old Riomar within walking distance of the Vero beachside village around Ocean Drive.

Riomar's streets connect it to the rest of beachside Vero Beach. Indian River Magazine notes that the Central Beach neighborhoods to the south developed later in the 20th century, with streets south of Beachland Boulevard named for flowers and those north of it named for trees. Riomar, with its club, its oaks and its 1919 golf course, came first. Vero Beach 32963 noted in 2012 that the MacWilliam family was one of only two year-round island families when Alex MacWilliam Jr. was growing up, a sign of how seasonal Riomar and the rest of the island remained during his childhood.

Riomar's oceanfront falls inside the Indian River County shoreline program. WQCS reported on February 20, 2026, that the northern section of Humiston Beach Park was closing for dune restoration and that affected beach access points included Humiston Beach, Flamevine Lane, Gayfeather Lane and Riomar Beach Access. The Sector 5 project area stretched from about a half-mile north of Tracking Station Beach Park to roughly a quarter-mile south of Riomar Beach Access.

The county project was rebuilding dunes damaged by hurricanes and reinforcing the shoreline, with completion anticipated by March 31, 2026, according to the same WQCS report. Some Ocean Drive parking was used for weekday truck staging during construction, while the Humiston Beach Park main lot, restrooms and pavilions stayed open.