Cayman Brac's 'Mr T' dies at 88
08.10.11
(CNS): Linton Nathaniel Tibbetts, OBE, who survived the 1932 Hurricane as a child and went on to make a vast fortune in the US, died late Thursday, 6 October, at age 88 in St Anthony's Hospital in St Petersburg. In Grand Cayman he is best known as the founder of the Cox Lumber store, a small part of large chain of lumber stores he built up in Florida. On Cayman Brac and Little Cayman he never stopped investing some of the wealth he made in his US business ventures, building three hotels and creating an airline just so that tourists could visit the Sister Islands. He also spearheaded the first museum in the Cayman Islands, located in Stake Bay on Cayman Brac, and he was the driving force behind both the Little Cayman Museum and the Little Cayman Maritime Museum.
Linton Tibbetts sold Cox Lumber Co. to Home Depot in 2006, and while the exact figure was not disclosed, the company, which reported sales of almost $400 million in 2005, was at the time the largest independent lumber and building supply company in the southeast United State, employing 1,600 people. In 2009, at the age 86, he and his family decided to start over by opening a new enterprise, Tibbetts Lumber Co, which already has four locations. He died just seven days after the grand reopening of the company’s store in St. Petersburg.
Source: Cayman News Service