Robert “Bob” Ragland was a retired pediatrician who sported long hair, a full white beard, rode a bike and championed environmental causes when few people of his generation did so.
He founded the Jacksonville chapter of the Sierra Club in 1970. He spent hours weeding parks in Avondale, planting hundreds of pine trees on land left him by his grandparents and battling city and state officials over environmental causes.
Dr. Ragland died at home on Sept. 27. He was 92.
“He grew up in one of Avondale’s most staid and conservative families,” said historian Wayne Wood, a friend of 40 years. “From a very early age, he knew he was destined to be a radical, and he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to that.”
His autobiography, “Genesis of a Rebel,” was published by the Robert B. Ragland Foundation in 2008. Wood, who helped him with the book, said the cover shows him sitting on a sand dune at Little Talbot Island with his white beard blowing in the wind and looking like a guru on top of a mountain.
“I feel like I’m misplaced in time,” Dr. Ragland said in a 2003 interview with the Times-Union after he started a neighborhood dialogue group.
Dr. Ragland’s interest in the environment went back to a childhood love of plants and animals fostered by his mother and grandmother. It took root when he inherited “Grandma’s Farm,” a large tract of land on the Westside and learned in the 1960s that the state planned to build Interstate 295 through the middle of it. He sued and held up construction of the highway, which bisects the land, for more than five years, Wood said.
Dr. Ragland’s foundation plans to continue preserving the land as a botanical sanctuary in an urban setting, said Chad Taylor, a long-time friend.
Dr. Ragland landscaped and maintained several Avondale parks. He also sought to raise public consciousness about invasive plants, such as the Chinese tallow.
The Jacksonville native attended Virginia Military Institute for two years before graduating from the University of Florida in 1941. He graduated from Duke University medical school and did his residency at Vanderbilt University. Later, he spent a year in seminary school at the University of the South.
In 2008, the Sierra Club presented him with the Champion of the Environment Award.
“Bob Ragland was a complex and wonderful guy who was probably Jacksonville’s most ardent environmentalist,” Wood said. “He was passionate about human rights. He truly was a person who wanted to save the world. In addition to all that, he was one of Jacksonville’s most colorful characters.”
In line with his wishes, two memorial services will be held, one on his Westside property and the other in Black Mountain, N.C., not to take place for a year.
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