Bertram Chapman Mayo

Bertram Chapman Mayo (March 23, 1865 – July 12, 1920), was an American newspaper promoter who developed summer resort communities by devising a plan to sell lots as a premium for subscribing to a newspaper.

Biography Mayo was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 23, 1865, to Noah Mayo and Emeline Smith. After graduation from high school he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but ended his studies without obtaining a degree. He worked as a clothing salesman in New England before relocating to California in the early 1900s where he obtained employment as the business manager for the Oakland Enquirer.

Mayo possessed a particular talent for promotion and applied this skill in such speculative ventures as oil drilling in Modoc County, California and a gold mine drilling operation in Nevada. In 1910 he purchased acres of rugged terrain in Sonoma County, California, platted the land into small lots as though it was level, and offered the lots for a few dollars each with a subscription to either the Oakland Enquirer or Sunset magazine. Mayo again used subscriptions to Sunset to dispose of steeply sloped, rocky lots in Brown Canyon at Beverly Glen, a development adjacent to, and now a part of Los Angeles, California. Employing the same scheme he established Lakeland in Berrien County, Michigan with the Chicago Evening Post, Beachwood, New Jersey with the New York Tribune, and Browns Mills in the Pines, also in New Jersey, with the Philadelphia Press. a benevolent founding father, or, taking a more nuanced approach, a clever entrepreneur.

In 1913 Mayo built a home at Tarpon Springs, Florida where he contracted tuberculosis. He died at a sanitarium in Asheville, North Carolina on July 12, 1920, and was buried in Los Angeles. Mayo had passed his newspaper real estate idea on to Warren and Arthur Smadbeck, New York real estate developers, who further refined the scheme and created more than fifty newspaper colonies in the United States and Canada.