On a late December morning on Triangle Ranch, Elizabeth Moore, blonde hair grazing her shoulders and wearing a sunny yellow tennis outfit with matching rubber boots, hops aboard a side-by-side (a souped-up, all-terrain, gas-powered golf cart and tractor hybrid) alongside her property manager Jason McKendree and his wife, Leann. She’s heading out to inspect the cabins that she built to remember the Florida Cracker life of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. The morning is chilly, and the mist is rising from the pasture as the sun warms the air.
Triangle Ranch is a 1,200-acre working ranch abutting the Myakka River, with cattle and pastures dotting the property between patches of Florida forest thick with palmettos, cabbage palms, pine trees and oaks overflowing with Spanish moss. It’s a Florida you won’t find farther west, where master-planned communities and subdivisions have taken over. It’s also a far cry from Moore’s childhood terrain in New England, where she spent frosty winters traipsing through forests and summers chasing butterflies and blowing dandelions. She says Triangle Ranch is a continuation of her lifelong passion for an “outdoorsy life.”
Moore moved to the area from Massachusetts in 2007 with her then-husband, Stuart Moore, and their school-aged children. Stuart Moore co-founded the digital advertising company Sapient, which was acquired by French communications group Publicis for $3.7 billion in 2014. When Stuart and Elizabeth divorced, she set out to use her settlement to enrich the Sarasota community she had grown to love, donating to and serving on the boards of nonprofits such as Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, Big Waters Land Trust, Gulf Coast Community Foundation, the Lemur Conservation Foundation, the Tree Foundation and the Climate Adaptation Center.
Owning a working ranch was not on her bucket list but, in 2016, she bought Triangle Ranch to save it from potential development. Developers were circling, and the ranch’s previous owners, Tony and Lela Carlton, were hoping to avoid the land being devoured by housing subdivisions. Moore stepped up, wrote a $3 million check, and collaborated with Big Waters Land Trust (then the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast) and the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD) to save the land.
But owning a ranch hasn’t been easy. McKendree points out different landmarks, recalling how the land changed during both the 2022 storm season, with Hurricane Ian, and 2024’s season, which brought hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton. Ian brought the most unprecedented flooding Moore and McKendree had ever seen, with most of the ranch underwater for weeks…