Major William Lauderdale commanded a detachment that built “Fort Lauderdales” during the Semilnole Wars in the 1838. By 1842 the fort was abandoned and for the next 50 years the area remained completely undeveloped. If William Lauderdale were around today he would be stunned to discover that a major American city was named for him, let alone than 10,000,000 million people each year include his namesake town on their vacation agendas.
Downtown Fort Lauderdale has a similar gaping hole in its heritage. The very first building constructed in town, at the landing of Frank Stranahan’s ferry in 1893, still stands and several buildings associated with the town’s pioneers are extant. But there are hardly any other buildings constructed before the 1970s to be seen.
With over 100 miles of natural and artificial waterways, Fort Lauderdale likes to fancy itself the “Venice of America” so the natural place to launch our walking tour will be down by the water...
The case can be made that if not for grass Fort Myers would not be the vibrant city it is today. In 1885, when the population was about 349, Thomas Alva Edison came to town on a hunt for the ideal filament for his incandescent light bulb. He believed the answer might be in the bamboo that grew in abundance along the Caloosahatchee River. He was wrong but he fell in love with the little hamlet and bought property for a winter retreat he called Seminole Lodge. He would be at least a part-time resident for the next 45 years. His friend Henry Ford would move in next door.
While in Fort Myers Edison set up a botanical laboratory to search for a way to make synthetic rubber. It is said he conducted over 500,000 tests on a different plants and trees, eventually settling on the weed Goldenrod to produce a latex. They were never able to produce rubber on a commercial scale, however, and the laboratory would be shut down after Edison’s death. But Edison’s botanical legacy continues in Fort Myers. In the 1800s he began planting rows of magnificent Royal Palms on the road near his home, giving Fort Myers its nickname today - “City of Palms.”
Fort Myers itself was named for Colonel Abraham C. Myers who never visited the place. The fort was one of many constructed along the Caloosahatchee River as a base of operations against the Seminole Indians in the 1830s. It was Fort Havrie then and it wasn’t particularly important until a hurricane blew away forts closer to the coast. The fort was abandoned for awhile and rebuilt in 1850 when hostilities flared again with the Seminoles. This time it was named Fort Myers for the man who was preparing to marry the daughter of commanding General David E. Twiggs.
The fort was abandoned after the Seminole Wars ended in 1856 but was re-commissioned with Union troops during the Civil War. After 1865 it was abandoned again and this time there would be nothing for troops to come back to as settlers trickling into the area helped themselves to the pine beams, windows, flooring and whatever else they could cart away.
The federal government would return to the site one more time, however, to build the grandest building in downtown Fort Myers on the site of the old fort and that is where we will start our walking tour...
Here. where the St Johns River turns east to make its final run to the Atlantic Ocean, the channel narrows enough that cattle were swim across the stream. The Spanish constructed a fort they Called St. Nicholas to guard the crossing in 1740 but to the English the area was always Cowford. After the Americans took control of Florida a section of Cowford on the north bank of the St. Johns River was named in honor of General Andrew Jackson, the first Territorial Governor. Jackson made it to the $20 bill but never made it to the small community that carried his name. Not many people did. Although streets were laid out by pioneers Isaiah Hart and Zachariah Hogan the population grew slowly.
Steamships began arriving in numbers in the late 1830s and by the Civil War Jacksonville was important enough for Union troops to lay siege to the town and sack it. Jacksonville built itself up after the war as a tourist destination but for the most part this would develop as a working town. Jacksonville claimed the largest naval-stores yard and largest wholesale lumber market on the Atlantic Coast. Although Tampa came to be called the “Cigar Capital of the World” the world’s largest cigar factory under one roof, producing 10% of all American cigars, was in Jacksonville. The state’s most important banks clustered here and the city, while excluded from the Florida land boom of the 1920s for the most part also missed the bust.
Today’s Jacksonville streetscape dates to a single day - May 3, 1901. that afternoon, around lunchtime, a fire broke out in a mattress factory where bedding was stuffed with sun-dried Spanish moss. Workers discovered the fire quickly and assumed a few buckets of water would extinguish the flames and did not even bother to sound an alarm. But dry and windy conditions quickly pushed the fire beyond their control and out the front door. Before nightfall the blaze had consumed 146 city blocks, destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and left almost 10,000 people homeless, although there were only seven deaths reported. Jacksonville’s 1901 Fire remains the most destructive burning of a Southern city in United States history.
Rebuilding of the city began in earnest. It is estimated that 13,000 new buildings were constructed between 1901 and 1912 in Jacksonville. New York City architect Henry John Klutho was responsible for many of the major construction projects in the city at that time. Klutho blended the new “Prairie Style” of architecture then being popularized in the American Midwest with Florida traditions that brought Jacksonville a fresh look for a new start in a new century.
Our walking tour of Florida’s largest city (by population) and America’s largest city (by land area) will find some of Klutho’s work still standing and we will begin in the shadow of his most ambitious work...
Before Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway arrived in 1896, the census in Miami could just about have been taken with a show of hands. The settlement that had begun on the north bank of the Miami River a half century earlier, Fort Dallas as it was called, had reached maybe 300 residents. The most prominent of these was a Cleveland heiress named Julia Tuttle who bought up 640 acres of land on the north side of the river where Miami is today and began planting citrus trees.
Almost from the beginning, however, Tuttle was looking beyond her orange groves. She pestered Henry Flagler in numerous letters to extend his railroad down to Biscayne Bay and offered him free land to do so. Flagler was doing just fine in St. Augustine and resisted Mrs. Tuttle’s entreaties. Then a great freeze descended on Florida in 1894-1895 that devastated the orange groves in central and northern Florida but did not reach the Miami river. Flagler’s railroad was in town the next summer and Miami was incorporated as a new city. The new town would grow steadily but Julia Tuttle would not be around to see it happen. She died of meningitis in 1898 at the age of 49.
The Everglades would be drained and the Dixie Highway would reach Miami from the midwest in 1915 and wealthy northern industrialists began returning from their winter vacations with dreams of south Florida on their mind. After World War I ended Miami was primed to be America’s boom town. The population of 30,000 in 1920 doubled by 1923 and doubled again by 1925. Skyscrapers were seemingly rising on every corner of downtown. The boom was residing in 1926 and was deflated totally on September 19, 1926 when a hurricane battered the city. And then the stock market crashed. By 1930 Miami had actually lost almost 25% of its population.
Most of the buildings we will see on our downtown Miami tour are a product of the Boom years or were constructed in the days of recovery in the late 1930s. Many reflect the dominant Mediterranean Revival style or show an adaptation of those elements to other architectural styles. We will start, however, with a building that makes no concessions to its tropical surroundings, a Neoclassical tour de force that would stand proudly in any major American city...
The first vision anyone had for the development of the barrier island across Biscayne Bay was as a coconut farm. Charles and Henry Lum bought up land in what would one day be known as South Beach and built the first house on the island in 1886. About 10 years later Henry Flagler’s great Florida East Coast Railway rolled into the area and entrepreneurs began to see that the island’s 15 miles of sparkling white sand beaches might be put to a better use than as a cocunut grove.
John Collins, Carl Fisher, and brothers John N. and James E. Lummus, began gobbling up land on the island around 1910 and in 1915 they incorporated the town and created the city of Miami Beach. The 1920s brought the first tidal wave of money onto the island. Titans of industry with names such as Firestone and Penney and Champion built mansions on what would come to be known as Millionaire’s Row. A trolley linked Miami Beach to the mainland. Pastimes for the wealthy northern visitors such as a golf course and greyhound racing were established. By the end of the decade Miami Beach was entrenched as one of the great American beach resort towns.
The hotels and surrounding structures that went up to accommodate this tourist trade were designed to foster Miami Beach’s image as a “tropical playground.” In the 1920s most of the buildings were fashioned in an Old World Mediterranean style that was guaranteed to appear exotic to the denizens of crowded industrial cities up north. In the 1930s the architecture shifted to the fanciful Art Deco style with buildings dressed in vibrant colors and illuminated in stylish neon. Miami Beach has the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world.
In 1979 Miami Beach’s Art Deco Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are more than 800 contributing structures in the district including hotels, apartments and other structures, most raised between 1923 and 1943. We will see more than 50 on our walking tour, all decked out with variations of sleek curves, eyebrow windows, glass blocks, spires, ship-like railings, gleaming chrome, porthole windows and other imaginative affectations. But before we start looking at buildings we’ll begin on a strip of land that has been a park for almost 100 years and where you can see something more famous than Miami Beach’s Art Deco hotels - the beach...
Although it can sometimes be forgotten, there was a history to Orlando before Walt Disney arrived in 1971; in fact Orlando was Florida’s largest inland city for the better part of the previous 100 years. The town owes its existence to its 111-foot elevation on a ridge from which the St. Johns River flows north and the Kissimmee River heads south. Fort Gatlin was established here in the 1830s where the drinking water was excellent and the garrison attracted a small group of intrepid settlers looking to run cattle on the wide plains of Central Florida.
One of the earliest was Aaron Jernigan, a Georgia man, who arrived with his herds in 1842. After the Army abandoned Fort Gatlin in 1848 with the cessation of hostilities with the Seminole Indians Jernigan built a small stockade and trading post. He was serving in the Florida legislature at the time as the first representative from Orange County and when the stockade received a post office in 1850 it was called Jernigan. The tiny outpost became the seat of Orange County in 1856. it would not however be Jernigan for long. Officials back in Washington heard tales of Aaron Jerdigan’s militia that led them to conclude his stockade was more problematic than the local Indians and he was relieved of is military command. The discussion to strip his name for the settlement led to “Orlando.” It may have been an honorific to Orlando Reeves (or Rees), a Fort Gatlin sentinel slain by Indians in 1845, or a nod to William Shakespeare’s romantic male lead in As You Like It. The true source of the town’s name is lost in the fog of history.
W.H. Holden established the first commercial citrus grove near Orlando in 1866 with seeds from fruit trees he found growing on his 100 acres. By the 1870s Orlando emerged as the center of Florida’s citrus industry.The Great Freeze of 1895 ruined the citrus trees and half of the area’s groves were abandoned. As the remaining citrus growers reorganized, the city became a popular resort destination for a newly mobile America. Many of those tourists would come back to retire as the population tripled from 3,894 in 1910 to 9,282 in 1920 and tripled again to 27,330 by 1930.
Orlando would be forever changed in 1965 when Walt Disney announced plans for Walt Disney World to be constructed in Orlando. Almost as soon as Disneyland opened in California in 1958 and became an immediate success, Disney set his sights on a second park in Florida. Disney rejected the population centers of Miami and Tampa because of potential hurricane damage along the coast and began gobbling up acres of cheaper Central Florida land. Disney World opened in 1971 and soon spawned satellite parks and entertainment complexes. Today, Orlando is the most visited city in America.
Our walking tour of Orlando will begin where traces of many of the town’s historical influences can be found: there is an amphitheater named for Walt Disney, there is a monument to the location where the unfortunate Orlando Reeves supposedly met his end, and there is a Shakespeare Festival each April staged by the University of Central Florida where dashing Orlando occasionally appears on stage to find happiness in the Forest of Arden...
Pensacola stakes its claim to 450 years and the oldest European settlement in the United States to a 1559 Spanish expedition helmed by Tristan de Luna sailed into Florida’s largest land-locked deep-water harbor. Luna brought a fleet of 11 vessels with the purpose of settling the area - in the contingent of 1,500 were many builders and craftsmen, including African and Indian slaves. But only weeks after coming ashore a violent hurricane sunk all but three of the Spanish ships and within two years even the most determined of settlers had abandoned the beleaguered outpost. For the next 140 years the only history made here would be the unrecorded activities of the indigenous peoples who lived here.
Late in the 17th century the French began actively poking around the lower Mississippi River and the Spanish constructed a fort in 1698 to guard the perimeter of their North Americans possessions here. One would be the Spanish construct of Fort San Carlos de Austria that would lay the foundation for what would become Pensacola. Their fears were not unfounded - the presidio would be sacked by the French in 1719. That began a stretch of 100 years where Pensacola would be controlled by the French, then the Spanish, then the English, then the Spanish again and finally, in 1821, the Americans. Andrew Jackson took possession of the Florida Territory for the United States in Pensacola and was made Territorial Governor. Jackson, never comfortable with the Spanish culture, stayed about four months and was back in Tennessee when the first legislative council of the new Territory of Florida convened here in 1822.
Pensacola was early Florida’s largest city, although it didn’t grow much beyond its treasured port. At the outbreak of the War between the States in 1861, when Confederate troops seized the town it was four blocks wide and about eight deep. In the last decades of the 19th century, after fire gutted the business district in 1880, Pensacola boomed with great stores of timber and lumber shipping out of port and America’s greatest catch of red snapper steaming in from the snapper banks of the Yucatan Peninsula.
Pensacola’s fabric has been interwoven with the United States military from its earliest days when President John Quincy Adams established a Navy shipbuilding yard on the southern tip of Escabambia County to take advantage of the hard and curvy wood of the abundant live oaks that grow there. In 1914 the United States Navy located its first naval aviation training base in Pensacola, bringing tens of thousands of recruits to town. A century later “The Cradle of naval Aviation” is still the town’s defining identity.
Another nickname for Pensacola is “The City of Five Flags” for Spain, France, Great Britain, the United States and the Confederate States of America. Of these, our walking tour will encounter the influence of this jumbled heritage. There will be the orderliness of the British street grid and the high balconies and wrought iron railings reminiscent of French settlements west of Florida and cottages constructed in the Spanish Colonial era and we’ll start, appropriately, at the spot where Pensacola once changed ruling hands...
In the early 1880s a Scottish investment group led by Sir John Gillespie purchased 60,000 acres from the Florida Land and Improvement Company, sight unseen. That must have been some sales brochure. Gillespie recruited sixty colonists, known as the Ormiston Colonists after his Scottish estate, to sail to the west coast of Florida. They arrived on Christmas Eve, 1885. What they found was land but no improvement; what Gillespie’s had purchased boasted one building and a trail. The Scots did not come unprepared, however. In their party was an architect, Alex Browning, to direct any construction necessary. The Scots platted out a street grid and named all the north-south streets running parallel to the water after fruits. Then they put the land up for sale.
That winter was a cold one, so cold it snowed. Most of the colonists left, they could get that back home. When no land sold in 1886 and only eight lots in 1887, the directors of the Florida Mortgage and Investment Company ordered a voluntary liquidation of their holdings. Gillespie’s son, J. Hamilton, remained in Sarasota to see what could be made from his personal holdings. It was slow going. By the end of the century the families in Sarasota numbered about 15, fisherman mostly, and the streets were used primarily by cattle and swine. “Fleas,” it was noted, “outranked everything in population.”
In 1902 Sarasota was incorporated as a town, and Gillespie was the first mayor. Municipal improvements included the paving of four miles of streets with two miles of cement sidewalks. By 1913 Sarasota was incorporated as a city as the population inched over 1,000. About that time Bertha Honore Palmer, widow of Chicago department store pioneer Potter Palmer, was lured to the area by an advertisement placed in a newspaper by A.B. Edwards, the first mayor after Sarasota became a city. Palmer declared Sarasota Bay every bit the equal of the Bay of Naples in southern Italy for beauty and raved about the sport fishing. Her comments were played up in the press and triggered the development of Sarasota as a resort destination. She purchased 90,000 acres in the area and with her sons developed an innovative cattle ranch.
Another pioneering resident was Alfred Ringling, one of the five Wisconsin brothers who established the famous Ringling Brothers Circus. The families of siblings Charles and John followed and not only were the Ringlings major players in the physical development of the city but they carried the Sarasota name around the world when they established the circus winter quarters here in 1919.
Our walking tour of Sarasota will begin in the historic center of town where just over 100 years ago John Hamilton Gillespie stood watching the cows and pigs and wondered if anyone was ever going to come...
Juan Ponce de Leon poked around this coast in 1513 and claimed the land for Spain. Afterwards both the French and Spanish attempted colonization in Florida but nothing took hold until 1565 when Spanish King Phillip II dispatched Pedro Menendez de Aviles to establish a base from which to attack the French. Menendex arrived in Florida on the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo and named his landing site after the saint. From that day on the town has been continuously occupied, establishing St. Augustine as the oldest city in America.
It was not without struggle. The town was sacked by pirates and under regular threat or attack, especially as the English colonies began spreading down the American coast in the 1600s. As such St. Augustine evolved as a military post more than as an economic and cultural center. After the town was attacked and plundered by English privateer Robert Searle in 1688 the Spanish began in 1672 the construction of a more secure fortification, the Castillo de San Marcos, which still stands today as the nation’s oldest fort.
As part of the Treaty of Paris ending the French and Indian War in 1763 the British received Florida in exchange for relinquishing control of occupied Cuba. Almost all of the more than 3,000 Spaniards sailed away, mostly to Cuba. The British were energetic stewards but the territory was ceded back to Spain by the United States in 1783 as recognition for their assistance in the American Revolution. Many of the St. Augustine exiles returned but by this time Spain was struggling to retain its distant colonies and it was only a matter of time before Florida would become a United States territory. It happened peaceably in 1821 by way of the Adams-Onis Treaty.
St. Augustine’s military heritage continued under American rule. The town played a role in the Seminole Wars and the War Between the States and the old fort was a military prison during the Spanish-American War. Only in 1898, after more than 200 years as an active fort under five different flags was the Castillo de San Marcos deactivated.
Henry Flagler, a failed salt miner, went into the oil refining business with John D. Rockefeller in 1867 and they built the biggest business empire in the world. Although Rockefeller’s is the name most associated with Standard Oil, he always gave the credit to its success to Flagler. On a wedding trip to Florida with his second wife in 1881 the Flaglers visited St. Augustine where they were charmed with the town’s Old World Spanish flavor. In short order Flagler gave up day-to-day operations at Standard Oil and set about developing St. Augustine as “the Newport of the South.” His vision would soon extend down the peninsula, however, extending his railroad and development all the way to Key West by 1912. What Flagler started in St. Augustine with a 540-room hotel would grow into a personal bet of $50 million on the future of Florida.
Over the years St. Augustine has tried to maintain that Spanish charm that bewitched Henry Flagler 130 years ago and to see how they’ve succeeded we will begin at the busy Visitor Center...
Incorporated in 1903, St. Petersburg was new type of American city for a new century. Before St. Petersburg towns grew up with an industrial base, exploiting their natural resources or advantageous trade location. Here, the town grew up as a recreation destination. When town leaders dredged the harbor it was for pleasure boats and a 29-acre yacht basin - in fact water commerce was actively shuffled south, outside of the town. And the people did come to play. In the first quarter of the 20th century the population rose from less than 2,000 at the time of incorporation to an estimated 26,000.
In fact St. Petersburg received the stamp of approval as “Sunshine City” by no less an authority than the American Medical Association as far back as 1885. Dr. W.C. Van Bibber reported the results of his research that indicated that Pinellas Point peninsula was the sunniest place in the United States. Seldom has a proclamation before an august scientific body been so publicized to the public as this one, thanks to promoters of St. Petersburg. Millions of dollars was expended spreading the word about America’s new Sunshine City. Lew Brown, the publisher of the St. Petersburg Independent announced that the entire edition of his afternoon paper would be given away FREE if the sun failed to show by 3:00 p.m. In 26 years the Independent was distributed free 123 times, five times a year.
Developing solely as a tourist resort turned out exactly as town founder John Williams envisioned it. In 1875 the Detroit native purchased 2,500 acres along Tampa Bay with pictures of graceful parks and broad boulevards dancing in his head. Not much happened on Pinellas Peninsula until 1888 when Williams convinced exiled Russian nobleman, the anglicized Peter Demens, to route his Orange Belt Railway here. The popular story goes that the two men flipped a coin to name the town and Demens won, christening the community after his birthplace in Russia. When Williams constructed the first resort hotel in town he called it Detroit for his home town.
A town as unique as St. Petersburg demands a unique walking tour and ours will involve a walk around a park and a walk around a lake, both in the center of town, and we’ll start off in the park...
When the Florida Territory was annexed to the United States, it welded together the Spanish colony of East Florida and the British colony of West Florida, an unwieldy political union. The first session of the new Florida Legislative Council met on July 22, 1822 in the old British colonial capital of Pensacola. It took the lawmakers from the one-time Spanish capital of St. Augustine 59 days to get to the meeting. For the second session held in St. Augustine the western legislators managed to make the journey around the peninsula in 28 days. Clearly this was not going to continue.
At that second session it was agreed to site a new territorial capital somewhere in the middle of the two towns and the spot chosen was an abandoned Apalachee Indian settlement called Tallahassee, roughly translated as “old fields.” In 1824 the third session convened in a crude log building here. But the arrangement was agreeable and a town materialized in the Florida wilderness. America’s foremost man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, paid a visit in 1827 and reported, “Tallahassee, a grotesque place, selected three years since as a suitable spot for the capital of the territory, and since that day rapidly settled by public officers, land speculators and desperados...”
Tallahassee developed into a center of the cotton trade and in 1834 Florida’s first railroad, the Tallahassee-St. Marks, was constructed to bring cotton to the Gulf of Mexico coast, 30 miles to the south. The first trains moving down the tracks were pulled by mules. By 1845, when Florida officially entered the Union a Greek Revival capitol building was ready. Tallahassee would be the only Confederate capital east of the Mississippi not to be captured during the Civil War but the post-war years brought a greatly reduced role for the town as cotton center. By the end of the 19th century Tallahassee had settled into a role as a government and education center with two schools, the Florida State College for Women and the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, operating near the Capitol.
For the first half of the 20th century Tallahassee remained a small southern town where most everyone lived within walking distance of the Capitol and decisions were made on spending projects hundreds of miles away in the exploding cities along the coasts. There was even a movement in the 1960s to move the state capital down the peninsula to the newly bulging population centers. Instead lawmakers opted to stay put and spend some of the state’s tax dollars on the capital city. The 1960 population of 89,000 has since doubled to over 180,000.
The first order of business to pump up Tallahassee in the 1960s was to erect a new capitol building and that is where we will start our walking tour, to see what that original log cabin from 1824 has wrought...
After the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1821 the government built a series of forts and trading posts to attempt to get control of the new territory. The post at the mouth of the Hillsborough River where it spills into Tampa Bay was named Fort Brooke, constructed by Colonel George Mercer Brooke in 1824. Enough settlers came to live near the protection of the fort that in 1831 a post office called Tampa Bay was established.
Isolation was the hallmark for the small community for the next 50 years. With access only by sandy road the population in 1880 was still only 720. Things would change in a hurry, however. First, phosphate was discovered southeast of town and as large quantities of the mineral were being shipped out of the port Henry Plant’s railroad arrived in 1884. In 1886 when Key West cigar manufacturers began experiencing labor difficulties the Tampa Board of Trade enticed Vicente Martinez Ybor to move his cigar manufacturing operations to Tampa. With two industries and transportation to get them to market, Tampa boomed. By 1920 the population in “The Cigar Capital of the World” was over 50,000.
As Tampa has evolved into a modern city it has been an enthusiastic participant in urban renewal. In the downtown area seldom does any block contain more than a single historic property and scores of one-of-a-kind buildings have fallen before the wrecking ball. Our hunt for Tampa’s heritage will begin in a small downtown park, greenspace that was won, ironically, at the expense of two historic buildings...