South Tampa farmer Marion Lambert, who led effort to raise Confederate flag, found dead, police say

TAMPA — Marion Lambert, the South Tampa farmer known for his effort to raise the huge Confederate flag near Interstate 75, was found dead on Wednesday, police said.

Lambert was found dead at his property known as South Tampa Farm, according to Tampa police. Foul play is not suspected, police spokesman Eddy Durkin told the Tampa Bay Times. Police have not released a cause of death.

Lambert was 73, public records show. His death was first reported by WFLA Ch. 8.

Lambert’s death ends a decades-long stretch running the four-acre farm that sits nestled among McMansions in one of the toniest parts of Tampa.

A Pensacola native, Lambert completed work for a master’s in psychology at 24, but when it was time to write a thesis, he got in his truck and drove toward Tampa, according to a 2018 Tampa Bay Times story. He purchased the farm in 1974 and was grandfathered in for agriculture.

At the time of the 2018 story, the farm featured an outhouse, 1,000 chickens and dozens of dairy cows, steer and hogs. Lambert sold milk, eggs, meat and honey by the honor-system. His customers dropped cash in a box and took what they wanted.

That year marked the 10th anniversary since Lambert led the effort to raise the massive 30-by-50-foot Confederate flag — then the world’s largest — over Interstate 75 near Interstate 4. Lambert bought the land on U.S. 92 in 2004, and got permits to build a park to honor “American veterans.”

“They never asked me jack,” Lambert said of the county in a 2008 Times story.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans raised the flag on the morning of June 3 of that year and lowered it that same evening, marking the 200th birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. But it would eventually fly 24 hours a day, lighted by spotlights at night, over a granite monument erected on the site known as Confederate Memorial Park.

“This is an inroad into the mind of society,” Lambert, who donated the property to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said at the time.

But the Ku Klux Klan used the flag as a protest symbol, John Coski, author of The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem, told the Times in 2008. The flag came to be seen less as an emblem of regional pride, and more as thinly masked hate.

Hillsborough County commissioners and activists fought Lambert’s flag’s raising from the beginning, saying it would damage Tampa’s reputation and hurt the local economy, but they couldn’t stop it.

Lambert told the Times in 2018 that he wanted to preserve Southern heritage and create “a memorial to those who served.” He said he wasn’t racist and was bothered by the fact that people feel bad and divided when they see the flag.

“It does bother me, a lot,” he said. “They don’t understand what it means.”