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| Abandoned lumber schooners, Miami 1926 State Archives of Florida |
By Jane Feehan
“A new era in water
transportation for Fort Lauderdale” was heralded in 1925 with the arrival of schooners
delivering lumber. The Florida East Coast Railway could not meet the delivery demands
of the city’s construction boom; ships expanded its logistics.
To supplement rail efforts, schooners were pulled out of storage or quickly constructed as “lighters” to move lumber, other building materials, plumbing supplies or furniture from Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville and other east coast ports. They traveled by ocean or inland waterway. Ships brought what the railroad could not. It wasn’t necessarily the easiest solution.
In November 1925, the 73-foot Spanish schooner Padro Garcia hit electric wires strung across New River, causing city outages until Southern Utility Company came to the rescue. About 4,500 volts lit up and damaged the ship’s anchor chain and other metal parts. The crew of eight along with a tabby cat and brindle bulldog were rescued. So were 80 tons of expensive 100-year-old Spanish tiles.
Storms wrecked a few ocean-going schooners off the Florida coast (crews were all saved). When they arrived at the harbor of Fort Lauderdale, some ships encountered problems navigating the sand bar blocking Lake Mabel, which was not cleared and opened as a port until 1928 (later Port Everglades). Other schooners coming down the waterway needed power boat or tugboat assistance moving through Tarpon Bend on the way to city docks.
Ships also carried cargo to the Las Olas Sound in the Idlewyld area. In December 1925, the largest schooner to arrive in Fort Lauderdale, the 215-foot Richmond with its nine-foot draft, was temporarily grounded in 7.5 feet of water while trying to reach the sound. It carried 320,000 feet of lumber, but the crew had to offload 130,000 feet to raft ashore; it was bound for Broward Lumber Company who picked up the valuable wood near the Las Olas Bridge. (Opened in 1924, the company advertised its motto: “We invented service in Fort Lauderdale.”)
The three-masted Richmond, sailing from Savannah, stopped in Fort Lauderdale on August 25, 1926, just weeks before the devastating September hurricane. The ship had been temporarily sidelined by a storm near Jacksonville and carried 300 tons of Long Island gravel. The cargo was used for repair from another hurricane and construction of the city’s waterworks, including its sewers. Little did they know that Fort Lauderdale would soon need other recovery supplies.
Mills and Mills, the company that owned the Richmond, established offices at the Sunset Building on Andrews Avenue. They hoped the schooner would be making a Fort Lauderdale stop every three weeks. They anticipated that Fort Lauderdale would be developed into “one of the finest seaports in Florida.”
Mills and Mills was right about Fort Lauderdale’s status as a seaport. Nature and economics proved them wrong about the viability of lumber schooners. After the Great Hurricane of 1926, South Florida boom days turned into an economic retreat.
Many schooners were abandoned, especially in Miami (see photo above) where there was far more dockage at Bayfront. But the reason to abandon wasn’t necessarily the devastating hurricane; seldom was there a return cargo. Most abandoned schooners were destined for lumber salvage.
Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan
Miami Tribune, Nov. 30, 1924
Fort Lauderdale News, June 18, 1925
Fort Lauderdale News, Oct. 13, 1925
Fort Lauderdale News, Nov. 3, 1925
Fort Lauderdale News, Nov. 4, 1925
Fort Lauderdale News, March 6, 1926
Fort Lauderdale News Aug. 26, 1926
Miami Herald, March 24, 1926
Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, history of Fort Lauderdale, transportation history, Fort Lauderdale in the 1920s
