Richard Green Johnson, Sr. (1866-1945) was born in Tallahassee to Green Johnson and Letitia Josephine Johnson, and in 1897 married Margaret “Maggie” Bell (1872-1955) of Concord, Florida.
Johnson owned a 1480-acre farm outside Tallahassee, where he raised hogs and cattle. He also managed the adjoining Horseshoe Plantation for the Griscom family, where his oldest son, Richard Green, Jr. , was born in 1900. Johnson served as chairman of the Leon County Board of Commissioners and bred bird dogs, which he sold for one hundred dollars.
About 1880 Johnson’s father-in-law, Dr. S. B. Bell, had begun acquiring property in the part of Dade County that became Palm Beach County in 1909 (see Bell). Johnson joined his brother-in-law, Charles Walter Bell, in purchasing land at fifty dollars per acre from the State of Florida in the Everglades area of Palm Beach County. By 1918 they had established Hereford breeding cattle and soon added thoroughbred hogs at Pelican Lake, formed when the dike was built and cut the Pelican River off. Charles Bell built a house on the property for his wife and seven children. Richard and Maggie Bell Johnson moved with their children from Leon County to Palm Beach County in 1922, living on Florida Avenue and on Vallowe Court, now the site of the Rinker School of Business at Palm Beach Atlantic University. They kept an apartment in Pahokee for their visits to the farm at Pelican Lake.
When the dike was rebuilt after the 1928 hurricane, Johnson and his partners convinced the state to build it such that it added 2,500 acres of farmland at Bacom Point, which Johnson and others improved and leased from the state for many years as Richlands, Inc.