Category: Miami Moments

By Paul S. George, Ph.D.

The population of the United States grew from 123 million in 1930 to 132 million in 1940, a 7.3 percent increase, which represented the nation’s lowest rate of growth for any decade before or since. Clearly, the weak growth was one of the ramifications of the Great Depression, as people were hesitant to increase the size of their families with the financial challenges facing many of them. 

Shows the intersection of Flagler Street and W. 1st Avenue, including the 1904 Dade County Courthouse and the location of present-day Cultural Center. HistoryMiami Museum archives.

But the Depression Decade of the 1930s was, as noted, a surprisingly vibrant time for the Miami area. The City of Miami’s population rose sharply, increasing, in rounded off figures, from 110,000 to 172,000, while Dade County saw its numbers jump from 143,000 to nearly 268,000. Miami Beach, now an ever more important tourist center, experienced a sharp rise in its year-round population, which spiraled from 6,494 to 28,000. The area’s eternal assets of weather and water, combined with the aforementioned growth in tourism, the rise of new industries and a robust construction sector, helped account for this growth.

Flagler Street looking east from NW 1st Avenue, circa 1930. Shows a traffic jam on Miami’s main shopping thoroughfare. Miami News Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum.

The first half of the 1920s represented a breakthrough for the young community of Miami Beach as a tourist resort. But it was followed by the inevitable dip in the numbers of visitors in the aftermath of the boom’s collapse and a ruinous hurricane that struck the area in 1926. Further exacerbating the city’s economic problems was the onset of the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, however, a rise in tourism, assisted by the attractive American Plan, a hotel package offering affordable room rates and meals, attracted many visitors. Further, major industries, like steel and automobile manufacturing, were becoming unionized, with workers winning benefits like pensions, health insurance and paid vacations. Accordingly, many workers enjoyed for the first time the splendid offerings of Miami Beach.

Laying [trolley] car tracks on Pine Tree Drive, Miami Beach. 1925 June 25. Matlack Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

The term “Art Deco” emanated from the famed Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which appeared in Paris, in 1925, and featured stylized representations of natural forms, employing geometry, vertical lines and an absence of three-dimensional decoration. For Miami Beach and elsewhere, it represents an earlier version of the streamline style, which dominated buildings of the mid- 1930s and onwards.

Since the preponderance of these hotels overlooked the warm waters of the Atlantic, their style reflected that location and included, in addition to the above elements, those of nautical design, such as portholes, ships’ decks, etc. Often, this hybrid style is referred to as Nautical Moderne or Tropical Moderne.

The management of these South Beach hotels looked forward to their best season yet as the winter of 1941-42 approached. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, however, quickly nullified this outlook, leaving ownership and management at their wits end as the nation went to war on December 8, 1941, the day following Pearl Harbor. But by the spring of 1942, greater Miami became a major training center for the nation’s war effort with more than 150 hotels offering thousands of hotel rooms pressed into service as barracks for the Army Air Force officer’s candidate school, an officers training school and a basic training center.

The Esther Weems Docked at the Port of Miami, 1920. Matlack Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

In the meantime, the City of Miami, lying five miles west of “the beach,” was showing signs of recovery, too. An article by Oswald Garrison Villard, in a March 1935 edition of The Nation, spoke to the city’s economic progress during the Great Depression. Villard, a grandson of famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, observed that “If one were to judge Florida by the appearance of Miami one would have to say that the depression is all over in this state. The streets are thronged with the tourists the city must have in order to live, since it has no other trade; the hotels are jammed; the night clubs flourish; there is building everywhere, with lots beginning to go fast; the newspapers are carrying more advertising by one quarter than a year ago; the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) reports only 4,000 cases…on the relief roll, of whom 1,300 are Negroes and 900 single or widowed women, as against a peak of 16,000 in 1932 and 10,500 in November, 1933. The visitors are spending money freely… “ and “there can be no doubt whatever of the revival of building.” Yet so much remained problematical, headed by rampant gambling, beneath the surface.

By Paul S. George, Ph.D.

The collapse of the stock market in October 1929 ushered in the Great Depression and brought an abrupt end to America’s Jazz Age. The Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history, was marked by massive bank failures, factory closings, rampant joblessness, deflation and a growing despair among the populace that good times would never return. Greater Miami exhibited each of these characteristics in a decade long economic struggle. 

In 1930, two of Miami’s largest banks failed as many Miamians lost their savings in this financial collapse. Only the First National Bank of Miami remained solvent under the leadership of Ed Romfh, a highly-respected banker and former mayor of Miami. In the immediate aftermath of the latest bank failure, the closing of the Bank of Bay Biscayne, the city’s oldest bank, crowds of panicky Miamians jammed the E. Flagler Street lobby of the First National Bank. Above the crowd from the vantage point of his mezzanine level office, Romfh spoke in a calm and reassuring voice. He invited nervous depositers to withdraw their savings while assuring all within earshot that his bank was solvent; many withdrew their savings; others took Romfh at his word and kept their money there. Many who did withdraw their money then hurried to the nearby United States Post Office in the Federal Building at the intersection of Northeast First Avenue and First Street to purchase money orders. Throughout the day, the Post Office treasurer sent his men back through the bank’s rear door to make cash deposits collected from people using postal money orders to conduct transactions in that era of widespread bank failures. This practice brought a large infusion of cash to the downtown post office, and, ultimately, to the First National Bank of Miami, its repository, reinforcing Romfh’s confidence that his bank would survive the financial crisis. 

In fact, Ed Romfh was so confident of his bank solvency, that his was the only bank in the United States that refused to close on the bank holiday declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 6, 1933, two days after his first inauguration. Romfh’s First National Bank of Miami would continue to flourish in the years and decades following the Great Depression. 

Shows President-elect Roosevelt speaking a Buick convertible. February 15, 1933; HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, President Roosevelt, working with overwhelming Congressional support, began implementing the New Deal, his program for fighting the Great Depression, one far more vigorous than that of his failed predecessor Herbert Hoover’s approach to combatting the economic malaise and rising hopelessness that had settled over the country since 1929. Highlighting the New Deal were a series of agencies and programs to put unemployed Americans to work in meaningful jobs to improve the country’s natural and built environment, its culture, entertainment, learning, etc. The funding agency here was the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA). Through its efforts 16,000 greater Miamians received federal assistance. 

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), the largest of the New Deal agencies, hired unemployed writers to produce a valuable guidebook to Miami. Musicians looking for work provided music under the auspices of the WPA in different venues of the city. Artists and architects drew murals for courtrooms, schools and other public buildings under the auspices of the WPA.

CCC workers constructing facilities (Matheson Hammock), circa 1930. HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Other agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which built the verdant Matheson Hammock Park and Greynolds Park, two of Dade’s premier parks. The CCC also constructed components of Fairchild Tropical Garden, lying next door to Matheson Hammock. Another “alphabet” agency, the Public Works Administration (PWA), built numerous new public buildings, including the Art Deco styled Miami Beach Post Office, Coral Gables Woman’s Club and Library and Coral Way and Miami Shores Elementary schools, each an architectural gem bearing the streamline style of the 1930s. The PWA also constructed Liberty Square in Liberty City, which was one of the first public housing projects in America. But the PWA’s most famous construction project was Roddy Burdine Stadium, named for the great merchant prince of retail and president of his eponymous stores. Originally a 24,000 steel and concrete arena, it would host from its opening in 1937 until its demolition in 2008 many of America’s most monumental football contests and other noteworthy events. Long before then, in 1949, it was renamed the Orange Bowl for the New Year’s Day classic that emanated from it. 

The New Year’s Day Orange Bowl game, which began in 1933 as the Palm Festival, was one of the most important of numerous events designed to draw visitors to the area and provide them with first rate entertainment. The Palm Festival became the Orange Bowl festival a few years after its inception. By the late 1930s, its New Year’s Day games were broadcast nationally. The festival quickly added a New Year’s Eve (held initially in the afternoon) parade to its offerings, and, later, many other events. The parade and the floats comprising it rumbled through the streets of downtown Miami to the entertainment of thousands of onlookers. The annual All American Air Maneuvers, held in an airfield in northwest Dade County, featuring skilled pilots of both genders engaged in daring maneuvers, also wowed large audiences of aerial enthusiasts from their beginnings in the late 1920s until America’s entry into World War II in the early 1940s (and briefly after the conflict).

Al Capone and another man in wrestling suits next to an outdoor ring. HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Legalized gambling was also pervasive, with pari-mutuel wagering at venues offering horse and dog racing, as well as jai alai. The Florida legislature even legalized slot machine gambling for two years in the mid-1930s, easing the way for the ubiquity of these devices throughout the area. 

These offerings, along with the area’s weather and waters, led to a steady rise in tourism, enabling greater Miami to confront the challenges of the Great Depression more successfully than many other parts of the country. Many tourists arrived on one of the two railroad lines serving the area as well as by airplane. Pan American Airways and Eastern Airlines led the way with both establishing their headquarters here. Out of this development arose Pan American Field, later known as the 36th Street Airport, and still later as Miami International Airport. Pan American Field rested on the south side of N.W. 36th Street near 52nd Avenue before developing in an easterly direction. By 1934, Pan American Airways had built a stunning Art Deco-styled building for its growing fleet of seaplanes at Dinner Key in Coconut Grove. The carrier’s busy seaplanes not only moved passengers and cargo, especially mail, to growing destinations north and south but these machines and their striking terminal also became major tourist attractions!

Miami City Hall and Police Station, 1920. Miami News Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

The Pan American terminal at Dinner Key closed in 1946, and for the past seventy year has served as Miami City Hall. Like other municipalities, the city of Miami has had its share of political volatility, and even rancor, in this building, as well as those city halls that predated it. The late 1930s were especially notable for a pervasive discontent by residents toward their elected officials. In 1938, fed-up Miami citizens advocated for the dismissal from office through a special recall election of Mayor Robert Williams and City Commissioners John DuBose and Ralph B. Ferguson, members of the “Termite Commission,” so named by their detractors because of their alleged corruption, heavy handedness with municipal employees, contempt for public opinion and under the table deal making, all of which, in the view of many, were eating away, like termites, at the freedoms of Miamians.

In the same year as the call for a recall election, members of the Termite Commission found themselves with additional problems as Williams and DuBose were tried, but ultimately acquitted, in the Florida Power & Light bribery case, as it was known. Williams and DuBose (Ferguson was charged, too, but the allegations against him were dropped due to a lack of evidence) had allegedly solicited, through a representative, a bribe payment of $250,000 from the power company in return for a settlement of all rate litigation matters on the company’s own terms out of court. In the following year, 1939, and on the heels of these acquittals, the recall election was held despite the energetic efforts of these officials to prevent it. Williams, Ferguson and Dubose were subsequently voted out of office by commanding majorities in the city’s first recall election. For its role in investigating the actions of the Termite Commission and setting the stage for the exit of three commission members, the Miami Daily News won its first Pulitzer Prize for the “most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any newspaper during the year.” Among the Miami Daily News staff involved in investigating the mayor and commission was Ann Mergen, whose searing political cartoons critiqued the actions of these municipal leaders. Mergen is believed to have been the first woman editorial cartoonist in the country drawing for a daily newspaper.

By Paul S. George, Ph.D.

The momentum that underlined seemingly all elements of Miami in the early 1900s only grew in intensity as the century’s second decade unfolded. Perhaps the most striking example here was the enormous population growth of Miami, growth assisted by the annexation of areas formerly outside of the city limits, causing the population to expand from 5,500 in 1910 to nearly 30,000 a decade later, the highest per capita increase of any city in the United States.

 Often overlooked in the chronicle of Miami in that era was the presence and place of Colored Town, today’s Overtown, amid a city on the rise. Colored Town appeared in the immediate aftermath of the city’s incorporation when land deeds to property within the municipal limits prohibited its sale to Blacks everywhere except for that quarter, located in the northwest quadrant of the nascent city. These restrictions were buttressed by ordinances, state and local, upholding the segregation of the races in accordance with the strictures of Jim Crow, or racial segregation, which had descended over the American South in the final years of the 19^th century.  

Despite deep pockets of poverty and a glaring absence of municipal services and amenities found elsewhere, this quarter hosted a rich array of enterprises, institutions and activities.  Colored Town’s main thoroughfare was Avenue G (Northwest Second Avenue), known as Little Broadway for its profusion of nightclubs and dance halls, a movie theater, and a sparkling roster of renowned Black entertainers who visited and performed in those attractions.

Black Miami grew quickly in the early 1900s, comprising twenty-five to forty percent of Miami’s population in its first generation of existence. Colored Town continued to develop and grow in subsequent decades, reaching its apex in the early years following World War II before experiencing a steep decline beginning in the 1960s for a host of reasons, including the construction of an extensive expressway system that ripped through a broad swath of the quarter and led to the displacement of thousands of residents.

Advertisement for Colored Town Bargain Store. Created in 1904. South Florida Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Other parts of Miami also saw great change as the new century unfolded. The number of tourists and new business establishments rose sharply.  Twelfth Street, today’s Flagler Street, had, by the early years of the 1900s, eclipsed Avenue D, today’s Miami Avenue, as the city’s most important thoroughfare becoming the address for the city’s leading business establishments.  Twelfth Street’s cachet continued to rise with the opening of the Burdine department store’s new five-story building, the city’s first “skyscraper,” in 1912. 

Miami was boisterously proud of its growth and accomplishments, typical of young “booster” cities as manifested in an ambitious, 15^th birthday celebration in July 1911.  The three-day event featured an “aerialist” soaring in a Wright Brothers airplane over a Flagler-built golf course west of Colored Town. For most Miamians, as well as visitors from as far away as Palm Beach County, this event marked their initial glimpse of an airplane. The experience served as a harbinger for the city’s emergence as one of the nation’s early aviation centers, since Miami’s climate, level topography and close proximity to water made it ideally suited for aviation activity., especially of the maritime variety.

Soon after the 15^th birthday celebration, Glenn Curtiss, already a famed aviator and a world record holder as an automobile race car driver, arrived and established a flight training school in Allapattah, a rich farming community on the north bank of the Miami River.  By the time America entered World War I in 1917, Miami and the surrounding area hosted several flying schools, including a facility near the Miami Canal, west of Miami, that Curtiss operated for future combat pilots in the Great War, and a bustling Naval air station on Dinner Key. The Army opened a gunnery school in deep south Dade.

Glenn Curtiss standing in field. Photo taken in 1925.

Miami was fully invested in the war, later known as World War I. Within one month of America’s entry into the war, thousands of members of Miami’s male population had registered for the draft. Many of the men training in the Magic City would return after the conflict, with wives they had met and married during and after their stay there.

Support for the Allied war cause was exhibited in various ways. Liberty Bond sales, highlighted by  persuasive “minutemen,” who delivered short speeches exhorting Miamians to purchase war bonds, nearly always reached their goal. Patriotic parades, a home defense force and other gatherings supportive of the nation’s war effort lit up the city. Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, which marked the end of the conflict with an Allied victory, was, ironically, the most memorable day of the war since an impromptu celebration, beginning in Colored Town and soon blanketing other areas of the city, erupted at dawn with a float bearing the effigy of Kaiser William II, the German emperor, hanging from a noose, cruised through the downtown sector. A Victory Parade and “Short Talks” in Royal Palm Park followed.  Finally, a dance finished off the offerings of a day no Miamian of that era would forget. 

At the same time, there were many Miamians who were still mending from the effects of influenza as part of a worldwide influenza epidemic that took the lives of scores of millions of persons.  Miami was effectively closed for a portion of the autumn of 1918. By the end of October nearly 90 Miamians had lost their lives to influenza. Yet the city’s resilience was again on display on October’s final day, with trick or treaters experiencing a busy Halloween night.

Tourism boomed before and after World War I primarily through the efforts of Everest G. Sewell, a self-taught public relations whiz who headed the Miami Chamber of Commerce’s tourist promotional campaign and, later, the Chamber itself. In the meantime, Carl Fisher, a brash Midwestern millionaire, was planting the seeds of a flourishing tourist community on Miami Beach with his tourist-oriented construction projects and promotion.  For the first time the Beach was connected to mainland Miami with the opening of the Collins Bridge in 1913. 

Sailors Outside Coconut Grove-Miami Bus. Photo taken in 1917. South Florida Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Many prominent Miamians, some in the winter visitors’ category, built large, stately homes along beautiful Brickell Avenue, creating a
“Millionaire’s Row.” The thoroughfare’s most prominent resident was William Jennings Bryan, presidential candidate, U.S. Secretary of State and sterling orator, who regaled crowds in Miami’s Royal Palm Park with his Sunday Bible addresses.  Bryan’s beautiful Villa Serena was overshadowed, however, by industrialist James Deering’s nearby Villa Vizcaya, a multi-million dollar Renaissance-era palazzo with rare statuary and other furnishings reaching back through the ages. Spreading over 180 acres of hammock land the complex offered beautiful formal gardens overlooking Biscayne Bay and even a farm and accompanying village, ensuring the self-supporting nature of the estate.  Built between 1914 and 1916, Villa Vizcaya employed ten percent of Miami’s population in its construction.

Beyond these seminal homes was a plethora of newly-built, less pretentious buildings. The Miami Herald observed, in 1912, that “a great wave of building prosperity is prevalent everywhere.” By 1916, the value of annual building permits had risen to $2,000,000.  Two men who would play major roles in the Florida boom of the 1920s were now involved in the real estate business, namely the aforementioned Carl Fisher, who was bringing Miami Beach into contention as a major tourist resort, and George Merrick, the son of a Congregational minister, who, along with his family, was farming in the piney woods of today’s Coral Gables. There he realized great success, but by the late 1910s, was preparing to transform his vast holdings into a beautiful Mediterranean-styled city.

Miami was already booming when the Roaring Twenties began.  The city’s population, as noted, had climbed to nearly 30,000. Its expanding borders now extended for a significant distance beyond its original western and northern parameters. Even beyond the new municipal borders significant growth was taking place.  

At the outset of the 1920s, The Miami Herald marveled at the “astounding growth of Miami as a tourist center.” In the following year, the Royal Palm Hotel served an estimated 35,000 guests. Increasing numbers of tourists now remained in the area after the winter season had ended, many becoming permanent residents.  But this growth would pale by comparison with what lay ahead—with the onset of the great real estate boom of the mid-1920s, one of the seminal eras in the area’s history.

View across Biscayne Bay shows the skeletal frame of new buildings rising above the ten-story McAllister Hotel. Photo taken in 1925. Gleason Waite Romer, photographer. HistoryMiami Museum archives.

By Paul S. George, Ph.D.

The early months and years following the city of Miami’s incorporation in 1896 were filled with promise and growth. By summer’s end, 1896, the new city already had a moniker: the “Magic City,” a name given it by Ethan V. Blackman, a publicist, ordained minister and writer who had never visited Miami, but who was swayed by the enthusiasm of Henry M. Flagler, who extolled the nascent community’s virtues and promise to him in a highly descriptive letter.

The ”magic” continued into the Christmas holidays of 1896, when the recently opened Hotel Miami hosted a large number of guests who enjoyed the sounds of music from a small musical combo while the nascent city basked in the satisfaction of its quick start.  A few blocks east of the Hotel Miami was the rising Royal Palm Hotel, whose opening was set for January 1897.

To bring the Royal Palm Hotel to fruition several developments had to first take place, beginning with  clearing the land at the construction site. The most notable feature of the site was a tall Indian burial mound, said to stand about twenty feet in height, with the remains of scores of persons buried there over an undetermined period of time.  John Sewell, who headed the Flagler organization’ s work in creating West Palm Beach, was assigned the task of clearing the land for the hotel and overseeing its construction after his arrival in March 1896. Sewell maintained in his autobiography that the mound ”stood up like a small mountain from the bay.” He employed initially a twelve man work force comprised of African Americans. After clearing the remainder of the site, construction was ready to begin.

On Christmas Eve, 1896, a few weeks before its opening, John Jacob Astor IV and his son, five-year old William Vincent Astor, visited the unfinished Royal Palm Hotel. The scion of the uber-wealthy Astor family whose fortune was traced to a flourishing fur trading business reaching back to America’s colonial era, John Jacob Astor was one of the wealthiest persons in the world.

John and William Astor arrived at the unfinished hostelry on Christmas Eve.  Workers and hotel staff were attentive to their needs, providing them with a room, as well as a makeshift Christmas tree, after felling a Dade County pine and decorating it in an effort to impart a sense of yuletide spirit for young William Vincent. The next morning, the youngster, adorned in a sailor suit, ran into the lobby and found, magically, under the “Christmas tree” presents from Santa Claus.  Sadly, the life of his father, John Jacob Astor, was cut short when he perished on the ill-fated RMS Titanic in April 1912.  

The Magic of Miami suffered a major blow the morning after Christmas 1896, when a ruinous fire, apparently triggered by the pyrotechnics celebration of the night before, damaged or destroyed many of the wood frame buildings bracketing the new city’s most important street, Avenue D, today’s S. Miami Avenue.  The city rebuilt quickly in its aftermath with its center now moving to Twelfth Street, today’s Flagler Street, which intersects with S. Miami Avenue.  

In the meantime, Flagler’s magnificent hostelry, which stood five stories in height, with a central rotunda reaching six stories, towered over a city of one story, wood frame buildings, opened on January 17, 1897, an event that buoyed the feelings of its citizenry in the aftermath of the ruinous fire. Its exterior bathed in “Flagler Yellow”, which was said to be the railroad titan’s favorite color, the Royal Palm Hotel was a massive concoction of color and design elements.  It offered 450 rooms, a mansard roof and a 578-foot veranda that wrapped around the eastern portion of a building stretching for nearly 700 feet.   Hundreds of mature coconut palms dotted the grounds, while a separate bathing casino featuring a large swimming pool representing just one of the striking amenities offered by the hotel.

Opening night featured a dinner amid an elegant setting of fresh flowers and gleaming crystal. The menu offered green turtle soup, baked pompano and dessert from a French pastry chef. Soon the roster of visitors to the posh hostelry would include the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Vanderbilts.

Photo of the Royal Palm Hotel taken in 1917. South Florida Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

While other new residents did not carry the cache of the above titans of industry, they did impress by their sizable numbers and passion for their new home. Their arrivals pushed the neophyte city’s population to 1,681 by 1900. 

Included in the ranks of “newcomers” was the Burdine family, headed by William Burdine, a merchant who would build his Burdine department store into one of the city’s most important businesses. Burdine was drawn to the Magic City after experiencing success selling clothing and other goods to military trainees who came here during the brief Spanish-American War, a conflict fought in 1898 over the issue of Cuban independence from Spain. 

Camp Miami, which stood on the northeastern edges of downtown, was a woefully inadequate training ground for 7,500 volunteer warriors in that summer of 1898 as fighting in Cuba raged.  The presence of thousands of troops from Alabama, Louisiana and Texas was a mixed blessing.  Their presence was great for business, but disastrous for law and order, as fights led to homicides among troops and the general population. Illnesses from dysentery and other causes led to the death of hundreds of trainees.

With the war over by summer’s end 1898, soldiers broke camp and returned to their home states without ever reaching Cuba and the theater of war. Shortly after the end of Camp Miami, Julia Tuttle, Miami’s “Mother,” died after suffering intense headaches over a lengthy period.  A shocked city, led by its business class, suspended activities during the period of Julia’s funeral and burial in the Miami City Cemetery north of the city limits.

Photo of Camp Miami taken in 1898. South Florida Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

As of if these dislocations and loses were not enough,  the city experienced a yellow fever epidemic in the Fall of 1899, which led to its quarantine for three months.  Nearly 200 persons contracted the scourge, with fourteen perishing from it. Yellow flags waved from the rooflines of residents stricken with “yellow jack,” warning that a sick person was on the premises.   

These early challenges tested the young city’s resilience and mettle, and it met each test successfully, pushing ahead as the new century dawned. In the early 1900s, new neighborhoods arose on both sides of the river, automobiles now joined bicycles as favored modes of transportation, while. tourism and farming represented the city’s chief economic endeavors. As noted, Twelfth Street was now the city’s most important street, although it was years away from even being asphalt covered.  Mixed with the wood frame buildings that bracketed the street were red brick structures hosting some of the city’s most important retail businesses. Miami had shed its frontier ambiance for that of a small Southern town. 

New, important projects in the nascent century’s first decade dictated future directions. Henry Flagler, who maintained a “hands on” policy toward his new creation, secured federal funding for the construction of a deepwater channel as well as the creation of the Government Cut, connecting Miami’s new bayfront port with the Atlantic Ocean lying several miles east of it. Flagler was also instrumental in connecting the Florida Keys through the extension of his Florida East Coast Railway to Key West. Additionally, the industrialist was involved in the appearance of a sparkling new county courthouse, which opened in 1904 on a city block donated by him to the county. 

Picture of 12^th Street looking West taken in 1906. South Florida Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

In the meantime, the State of Florida was embarking on an ambitious program of Everglades drainage beginning in 1906, with the goal of providing fertile new lands for agriculture. In 1909, a dredge began digging a drainage ditch near the headwaters of the Miami River, and by 1913, this waterway, called the Miami Canal, connected the river with Lake Okeechobee, while the water from the swampland was carried out to sea along connecting waterways.

Everglades drainage, sometimes referred to as Everglades Reclamation, led to the birth of a feverish real estate industry for Miami and most of southeast Florida as large speculators purchased vast tracts of reclaimed land from the State of Florida , then marketed it aggressively in many parts of the nation.  The unsavory sales tactics of promoters who sold unwitting investors land that was still underwater, since drainage proceeded slowly, earned for Miami an enduring reputation for marketing “land by the gallon.”

By 1910, Miami’s population had soared to nearly 5,500, while the number of tourists and new business establishments rose sharply.  Miami could look to the future with deep satisfaction based on solid accomplishments registered in its years since incorporation.

Fishery and boats docked on the Miami River. Photo taken on July 10, 1922. Matlack Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami archives.

By Paul S. George, PhD.

For many years, “Miami,” a place name used here to describe all of vast, sprawling Miami-Dade County, was dismissed as being too “young” to possess a history since its flagship city and the county seat, the City of Miami, was only incorporated in 1896, thus ranking it among the youngest of the nation’s most important municipalities. Yet, archaeology provides a far different picture of the area’s age. Archaeology has long been a boon to history, especially pre-history, and this discipline has, in the past fifty years, opened our eyes to just how long ago humans have lived here.

Amid a lengthy archaeological excavation in 1985-1986 in deep South Dade, near today’s Deering Estate, a small number of human fossils as well as artifacts of humans were uncovered and determined through radioactive carbon test dating to be in excess of 10,000 years of age. Conditions there were excellent for these non-agricultural people, these indigenous Miamians, who hunted and gathered food in wooded and open areas filled with a wide variety of game, and fished in the warm waters of today’s Biscayne Bay.

Subsequent excavations along both banks of today’s bustling Miami River indicated that indigenous people lived there for at least a few thousand years, and maybe more. These indigenous people were builders who used precision with primitive tools to carve foundations in circular fashion for homes built atop them. There are even indications that platforms may have been built under the settlement, providing it with elevated flooring for an area that may have already been experiencing rising waters. The foundations, the most famous of which is the Miami Circle on the River’s south bank near its mouth, that have been uncovered in recent decades point to examples of astonishing precision in creating perfectly circular carvings in the bedrock.

Seminole man spear fishing in the Miami River, from a dugout canoe. Photo taken in 1920. Matlack Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Our first recorded mention of humans in the area of today’s Miami-Dade County came with the journey of discovery of Juan Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer, who may have landed an expedition off of Key Biscayne in 1513, as part of Spain’s attempts in the sixteenth century to take control of La Florida. What we are more certain of was the establishment along the north bank of the Miami River near its mouth of a Spanish Jesuit mission to the native populations in 1567, just two years after Spain had claimed Florida as a colony.

Led by Brother Francisco Villareal, S.J., who was accompanied by Spanish soldiers, the Mission at Tequesta was nestled among its eponymous inhabitants on the north bank of the Miami River near its mouth. The major objective of this and other Jesuit missions was conversion of the native populations to Roman Catholicism. Spain in that era was among the most Catholic of nations when many parts of Europe had broken with Rome and Catholicism leading to the emergence of many Protestant religions in the 16th Century. The Tequestas, so named by Juan Ponce de Leon while on a visit to the southwest coast of Florida, lived in a lush subtropical area with settlements stretching from the Florida Keys to today’s Broward County, with the largest concentration along the Miami River and on the northern portion of today’s Key Biscayne.

Brother Villareal and the Tequestas had a close relationship in the brief time he was at Tequesta. He was followed there by a Jesuit priest who established, in 1568, a second mission. A third and more ambitious mission opened in 1743 near the earlier encampments. Headed by two Jesuit priests, it found fewer Native Americans in the area than indicated by accounts about earlier times. Surely the Spanish entrada in 1513 with Juan Ponce and the many who followed him had changed radically—and for the worse—the lifestyle of the Tequesta. Victims of disease, war and other dislocations, the Tequestas, along with Florida’s other native populations, numbering and several 100,000s around 1513, had virtually vanished 250 years later, leaving a lush landscape bereft of humans.

Portrait of Ponce de Leon, with columns and ship in background

During the course of this time, Spain controlled Florida, but experienced little success in creating a viable colony. (Briefly, from 1763 to 1783, England controlled Florida.). Neither colonizer made an impact on south Florida, although Spain granted a large tract of land in the early 1800s to Pedro Fornells, a Spaniard, as well as parcels of land on both sides of the Miami River to Bahamian families.

In 1821, Florida became an American possession through its purchase for $5 million in Spanish damage claims against the young country. Soon after, Florida became a Territory of the American government, preparatory to entering the United States in 1845 as its twenty-seventh state. Florida grew quickly under its new flag, but that growth, throughout most of the nineteenth century, was confined to the northern portions of the territory. There was one notable exception here, and that was the development of Key West as an important port, military base, and center for the wrecking or salvaging industry involving ships laden with goods that had run up onto the Florida reef and were, at least for a while, disabled.

In 1830, Richard Fitzpatrick, a prominent figure in the politics of Territorial Florida, who was raised on a plantation in South Carolina, purchased the Bahamian-held lands along the Miami and New Rivers. Fitzpatrick established a slave plantation on both banks of the stream, as well as on the New River in today’s Fort Lauderdale. More than sixty enslaved persons cultivated a wide array of crops on Fitzpatrick’s Miami River plantation.

But Fitzpatrick abandoned his plantations soon after the commencement of the Second Seminole War, a conflict prompted by America’s determination to uproot Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi River to new venues west of the stream thereby opening the abandoned lands to American farmers and other settlers. The Seminoles were members of the Creek Nation, found initially in Georgia, but who had migrated to Florida in the early 1700s. Fought between 1835 and 1842, the Second Seminole War was the longest, bloodiest war between American and Seminole warriors in the nation’s history. (An earlier war, the First Seminole War, was waged in northern Florida in 1817. The issues surrounding it differed from those that triggered the Second Seminole War).

The conflict led to the rapid depopulation of Miami and other parts of southeast Florida. A small military force replaced the civilian population near the end of the 1830s, as the United States Army established Fort Dallas on a portion of Fitzpatrick’s abandoned plantation on the north bank of the Miami River. Soldiers from Fort Dallas periodically paddled upriver and into the Everglades in search of elusive Seminoles.

Seminole man, woman and three children. Photo taken in 1885. Matlack Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Following the conclusion of the war in 1842, Fitzpatrick’s nephew, William English, acquired the former’s Miami River property and reconstituted the slave plantation, adding new buildings to the complex. Yet little is known about the English plantation. A man of large ambition and vision, English platted the “Village of Miami” on the south bank of the river. English sold several lots in the development before leaving the area in the late 1840s for the California gold rush. There, he not only came up empty-handed in his quest for gold, but, more importantly, he lost his life when his gun accidentally discharged and a fatal bullet entered his body as he was dismounting his horse. As for the Village of Miami, it never materialized. English was fifty years ahead of his time.

During the second year of fighting in the Second Seminole War, Dade County was created. Enormous in size geographically, it stretched from the northern Florida Keys to the St. Lucie Inlet. Yet its population remained miniscule. Dade County could claim one prominent business, located near the headwaters of the North fork of the Miami River and on the eastern edge of the Everglades where the Ferguson brothers, Thomas and George, operated a coontie starch mill, powered by the “rapids,” or the swirling waters of the river in that area. The business employed about twenty-five persons who ground the root of the Cycad plant into a starch for baking and laundry and sold in markets elsewhere.

The Third Seminole War (1855-1858), sometimes referred to as the Billy Bowlegs War, prompted the U.S. Army to reestablish Fort Dallas on the English property. Although it was waged on a far smaller scale than the previous conflict, this final war pitting American forces against the Seminoles further discouraged settlement in Miami.

While the problems between Native Americans and the few settlers in the Miami area receded in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the site of today’s greater Miami remained remote and tiny in population, its settlers spread out in farming communities, many of them recipients of 160 acres of land, compliments of the Homestead Act of 1862, along the shores of beautiful Biscayne Bay. The area produced a wide variety of farm crops, many of which were shipped to market via the waters of the bay.

In 1890, the U.S. Census found less than 900 people living in Dade County. But change was coming, and in a major way. We will examine those critical years of the late nineteenth century in our next blog entry.

Seminole people. Photo taken in 1915.