Well-known Florida CRE veteran and raconteur turns novelist

Before Bill Eshenbaugh got into the commercial real estate business, he wanted to be a history teacher.

This was back in Pennsylvania, when he was in high school, before a cousin in the business talked to the then 17-year-old about how much money was at stake. It would take, Eshenbaugh told the Business Observer in a 2023 interview, almost 25 years of teaching to earn what the cousin had earned the previous year.

Eshenbaugh, who graduated with a degree in business from Penn State University in 1964, took the cousin’s advice: He skipped out on teaching.

Instead, since moving to Florida in the 1980s, he has become one of the top commercial real estate land brokers in the state. He started his own firm, the Eshenbaugh Land Co., which he sold about 10 years ago, and is still working deals, still teaching seminars and remains a well-known industry insider.

At 83, the man known far and wide as "The Dirt Dog," is still going strong.

So strong in fact that’s he’s added another title to his resume: novelist.

Eshenbaugh is the author of "Up the Shenandoah," a novel released in November that tells the fictionalized story of his family during the Civil War and the family farm in Pennsylvania’s Shenandoah Valley. 

The book

It starts in 1864 when Andrew Eshenbaugh leaves his wife and family to serve under Union Gen. Philip Sheridan. The family, particularly Will, who is Andrew's son, is left to fend for itself.

“From stagecoach robberies to deadly showdowns, from campfire camaraderie to the shock of Lincoln’s assassination,” the book’s marketing material says, the story “plunges readers into the grit, fear, and courage of ordinary people caught in extraordinary times.”

The story is based on the experiences of Bill Eshenbaugh's great-grandfather — Andrew — and grandfather — Will — during that time. Bill Eshenbaugh grew up listening to his father, who lived with Will and Andrew, tell the stories he’s chronicled.

While the story is Will’s, the emotional center is Bill's great-grandmother, Sara. “I found myself admiring Sara, Andrew's wife. Back home, a passel of kids, no idea where her husband is, maybe not even why he went, what's happened to him. And to maintain the farm and so forth. I really found this fascinating,” Eshenbaugh says in an interview. 

(About 68 acres of the farm in the story, which at its peak was 131 acres, still belongs to members of the family. Sara, a great-great granddaughter of Will’s grandmother, and her husband just built her house on part of the original farm.)

The book came from Eshenbaugh’s continued love of history (he’s traced his family history back to Germany in 1710) and an insatiable need to tell stories.

He says the project has been in the works for years, though he didn’t quite realize that a book would come out of it until recently.

The realization grew out of tracing the family’s history — a framed family tree hangs in his South Tampa office — and researching and writing blurbs about individual members.

Then, two summers ago, he organized a “graveyard crawl” with about 40 family members from across the country in Pennsylvania. The family visited the gravesites of their ancestors and told stories about the past, settling down for a long picnic lunch.

Eshenbaugh finished the day “with more information than I knew what to do with.”

That research, he says, along with the family gathering “kind of brought me full circle and I started writing."

Eshenbaugh spent two years working on "Up the Shenandoah." He received no formal training or support as he wrote. He simply, much to the frustration of professional writers, started writing and the story came pouring out.

He is not a total amateur, however. He’s spent years writing case studies for classes he taught in an out of the firm, and, as an amateur historian of sorts, he is an avid reader.

And, to be fair, he’s a storyteller by nature.

Spend any time with Eshenbaugh and you can see that he’s a born raconteur. A scheduled 20-minute conversation lasts one hour and three minutes. He was born in 1942 but says “June 24, 1942 was the start of this wonderful journey.”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all” that he wrote a book, says Ryan Sampson, who bought the firm from Eshenbaugh in 2015. “He is one of the best storytellers I know, and he loves history. He would have been a history teacher if only it paid more.”

Work on the book started in earnest when he got advice, he says, “to pick up your computer and start drafting. Find a starting point.”

“So, I did, and it was kind of fun developing, weaving some people and characters and stuff into this thing.”

He chose to write a fictionalized version of the story because writing an official history would have required too many reference points. That does not mean that much of what he wrote isn’t historically accurate.

The real breakthrough on the writing, though, happened several weeks later when his wife, Lynda Keever, got ill on a month-long cruise to the Mediterranean. That setback, and a storm that delayed departure from a port, gave him time to write a few chapters and begin to get a grasp for the story which, to that point, had mostly been notes and in his head.

The end?

Eshenbaugh says one of the hardest parts of the process, as any writer will tell you, was finding where to end the story. He didn’t want it to go on forever, making it too big where people wouldn’t read it.

So, he ends it at the end of the Civil War. As for a next book, Eshenbaugh isn’t sure what he’ll write yet. There could be a sequel, a continuation of the story told in "Up the Shenandoah."

 Or, he could write about his life and adventures in the real estate business.

He will figure that out in time. But one thing is certain, there is little doubt that when it comes time to tell the story, whichever one he chooses, Bill Eshenbaugh will have something to say.