Meet Waldo Sexton

Waldo Sexton was one of the most colorful and visionary figures in Vero Beach history — a larger-than-life entrepreneur, collector, and self-promoter who arrived in Indian River County in the early 1920s and immediately set about leaving his mark on the landscape. He built a sprawling citrus and cattle empire, but it was his eye for the eccentric and his obsession with collecting antiques, artifacts, and architectural salvage from around the world that truly set him apart. Sexton had an almost compulsive need to acquire — bells, tiles, wrought iron, Spanish colonial furniture, old doors, cannons — and he put all of it to use in the buildings he created along Vero Beach's oceanfront.

His two most enduring legacies sit side by side on Ocean Drive: the Driftwood Resort, which he built beginning in the 1930s using salvaged timber, ship's parts, and whatever else he could get his hands on, and the Ocean Grill restaurant, which opened in 1941 and remains a Vero Beach institution to this day. Both buildings reflect Sexton's philosophy that a structure should tell a story — nothing matched, nothing was ordinary, and that was entirely the point. He wanted visitors to feel like they had stumbled into somewhere genuinely unlike anywhere else on earth. Decades after his death in 1967, his buildings still do exactly that, and the Driftwood and Ocean Grill remain among the most beloved landmarks on Florida's Treasure Coast.