Florida: a state of superlatives and high hopes in 1921 ... and today?

 

Baggage at Florida East Coast Railway Depot 1921
Florida State Archives

Newspapers played a big part in promoting Florida during the boom days of the early 1920s.  The Miami Metropolis was no exception. In 1921 stories about building and farming splashed across its pages:

• Few realize the extent of Great Reclamation Project at Back Door of Miami

• Vast Area in Everglades Now Being Farmed

• Miami Leads Entire State in Building

Miami 1921
Florida State Archives

Among the stories of the day was a summary of Florida superlatives. Time, no doubt, has altered Florida’s first place status in some. Many of these firsts were in agriculture. Others became realties a few decades later and remain so today.

Florida has first place:

In diversity of food products

In value per acre of farm products

In untilled area that is tillable

In number of growing days

In phosphate mining

In fishing industries

In Fuller’s earth output

In variety of trees
In area of standing timber

In length of coastline

In variety of birds
In winter-grown truck products

In coconuts
In camphor

In variety of hay crops
In sisal

Florida is:

The orchardist’s lotus-land

The trucker’s opportunity
The farmer's three chances a year

The fisherman’s Galilee

The lumberman’s last stand

The beeman's land of milk and honey

The dairyman’s flowing bowl

The filmmaker’s dream

The home seeker’s goal

The citizen’s cornucopia

The manufacturer's future

What's Florida first in today? 

Freedom

Boating from Belle Glade to Fort Lauderdale 1921
Florida State Archives

Source:

Miami Daily Metropolis, Oct, 25, 1921

Tags: Florida history, Florida in the 1920s, Florida boom, Florida boom times, 1920s South Florida , Florida boom, film researcher

Florida tent camps, tourism and housing shortages

Florida tourist camp 1928
 Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan


Florida tent cities served as lodging for workers, refugees, survivors of storms, and criminals in the past but they also housed tourists who wanted to vacation on or close to the beach or who couldn’t find a hotel room. 

Hotels (and housing) were scarce in early 20th century South Florida, but locals wanted tourists’ business and encouraged them to stay at tent camps in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and other communities. 

Frank Stranahan constructed a tent camp near his trading post on Fort Lauderdale's New River. His camp provided housing made of "palmetto constructed homes" for visitors in 1925. Another Fort Lauderdale camp housed 700 during that winter. Las Olas Inn across from the ocean provided "luxurious" tents for guests when rooms were were filled.

Below is a description of a popular tourist camp in Miami.

Tent City Gainesville, 1922 
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

Miami Beach boasts a “tent city” second to none. This “city” is located on the oceanfront between Smith’s Casino* and the government reservation. There are 20 tents or more, all well floored and comfortable.

Between 40 and 50 persons – men, women and children – compose this happy little community, where ceremony and etiquette has been abandoned and all live as one great, big family, enjoying life in all its fullness. All these people are tourists and all amply able to afford the luxuries of hotel life, but they prefer to spend their vacation in a tent by the seashore.

Last Saturday night these people chartered one of the ferry boats and enjoyed a moonlight ride to Cape Florida and return. Light refreshments were served and music indulged in.

But camps were also constructed to cope with a housing shortage. In July of 1925, a proposal was voted in by Fort Lauderdale to set aside an area in Progresso for 150 camp lots. Another camp was approved near "the Dixie" [highway] for  construction workers. 

People came to Florida and stayed at camps for various reasons. Some stayed while they looked for work or opportunity. When one visitor was asked in 1926 why he came to Florida and stayed at a camp, he answered "because this is where the money is." 

Most however, stayed at camps for inexpensive vacation lodging. Today, we call these RV parks.

---
* Smith's Casino was a popular beach side pool in the 1920s that sat on the south end of Biscayne Boulevard. 

Sources:

Fort Lauderdale Sentinel, Jan. 6, 1925

Fort Lauderdale Sentinel, July 23, 1925

Miami Metropolis, Feb. 7, 1920

Fort Lauderdale Sentinel, Feb. 7, 1925

Fort Lauderdale News, Feb. 23, 1926

Tags: early Florida tourism, early tourism in Miami, Florida tourism in the 1900s,
film researcher

About that name Publix ... and its link to Paramount Studios

 

By Jane Feehan

George Jenkins opened Publix Food Store in Winter Haven, Florida Sept. 6, 1930. In 1940 he launched Publix Super Market; the rest is history and part of everyday life for the millions of us who shop there. But the provenance of the name Publix goes back to Dec. 21, 1925 and it’s linked to show business.

That’s the year the two largest movie theater groups in the world—Famous Players Lasky and Balban and Katz Theatres of Chicago and the Middle West—merged to form Publix Theatres, Inc., an affiliate of Paramount Studios (formed 1912 and led by Adolph Zukor). From that date, Sam Katz president and Harold B. Franklin, vice president, oversaw operations of 700 theaters throughout the nation, including those in St. Petersburg, Tampa, West Palm Beach, Jacksonville and a list of others in Florida.

The film industry was an expanding and relatively new form of entertainment in the 1920s, especially after the first “talkie” with Al Jolson in the Jazz Singer released in 1927. There was still an attachment to live theater or vaudeville, so it was common to see a movie paired up with an extravagant live revue before a film started (much like latter day Radio City Music Hall).  

Revues included scores of entertainers. One newspaper in Buffalo claimed $2 million was spent to provide for “the greatest in picture and mammoth stage production.” Publix Theatres built a reputation for operating lavish theaters with plush carpeting and luxurious seating. Their reputation also included maintaining a well-trained staff.

The Buffalo Times exclaimed Publix Theatres entertained on a “scale so elaborate that no single theatre could afford it.”  The New York Daily News billed one of the Publix Theatres, the Paramount in the Paramount Building in Times Square, as “New York’s Newest Wonder.” A reporter for The Middletown Times Herald in New York state wrote “as Publix goes, so goes the rest of the show business. Expect everything in a Publix Theatre because you won’t be disappointed.”

The stock market crash of 1929 changed the course of Publix Theaters, Inc. Debt piled up. Bills went unpaid. The company restructured in 1930 but filed for bankruptcy and went into receivership in 1933. By 1935 the company reorganized as Paramount Studios.

The Publix theaters were failing so George Jenkins "borrowed" the name. He liked the name for his new business; its reputation was tops – and remains so to this day--though for a different business with a much longer history.

 

Sources:

Yonkers Herald, Dec. 21, 1925

Buffalo Times, Jan. 14, 1926

Buffalo Times, May 27, 1926

Yonkers Herald, Sept. 21, 1926

New York Daily News, Nov. 28, 1926

Middletown Times Herald, June 10, 1930

New York Daily News, July 20, 1933

Library of Congress

Florida State Archives/ Florida Memory: https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/321985

Tags: Movie theaters, Florida in the 1920s, Paramount Studios, Publix Theatres, Inc.

Dark days of Florida's convict lease system and a North Dakota man's death

Convicts leased to harvest lumber
Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

The convict lease system emerged in the South after slavery was abolished in 1865. Some lawmen helped farmers cope with the workforce shortage by arresting African Americans, and later white men, on trumped up charges and renting them out for labor.  Sentiment raged for decades against leasing convicts but Florida and Alabama were the last two states to pass laws against the system in 1923.

The case of Martin Tabert, a young North Dakota resident arrested for hopping a train near Leon County  brought an end to this dark chapter in Florida’s history. 

Sentenced to labor, he was rented out to a lumber company operating in the Panhandle. Soon after, Tabert was flogged when he became too ill to work. Within hours of the beating, he died.  His parents brought suit against the lumber company more than a year later after they were informed of the circumstances of their son’s death. They were awarded $20,000 in a court battle that grabbed national headlines. Subsequent to the trial, Florida Governor Cary Hardee introduced legislation that outlawed flogging and abolished the convict lease system in 1923.

Miami Metropolis, Nov, 28, 1923

 Copyright © 2020, 2023. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan

Sources:

http://www.dc.state.fl.us/oth/timeline/1921.html

Estabrook, Barry. Tomatoland. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011

Miami Metropolis, March 28, 1910, p. 9

Miami Metropolis, July 12, 1911, p. 4

Tags: Florida history, labor history, African-American history, convict lease, flogging, film research

Drilling for oil in South Florida during the 1920s

Oil drill blaster in the Everglades - 1924
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan

The advertisement below from the Fort Lauderdale Herald (January, 1922) touted the possibility of oil riches lying near Miami.  Capitalized with $100,000, the Miami Petroleum Syndicate was trying to sell shares for $100.  Ads – and news – dropped off about attempts to either raise funds or find oil under the Magic City within a year.

Oil fever also struck Fort Lauderdale.

In 1928, when Fort Lauderdale was in the throes of a land bust, methane and ethane gases were thought to be rising from the New River.  A lease was obtained to drill and a rig went up in Croissant Park.  The city was so enthusiastic about it and the possibility of climbing out of economic stress that tax bills went out briefly bearing an image of an oil well. Attempts to find liquid "gold" were abandoned at 3,000 feet when funds were depleted. After World War II, the well was exploded.

Advertisement 1922

Other sources:

Weidling, Philip J., and Burghard, August. Checkered Sunshine. Gainesville: University of Florida Press (1966).

Fort Lauderdale Herald, February, 1922

Tags: Florida history, Fort Lauderdale history, South Florida history, oil in Miami, oil in Fort Lauderdale,film research 

Telling "Truth about Florida" and the land boom ... until the 1926 hurricane calamity

 

Aftermath: Miami garage damage Sept. 18, 1926
Florida State Archives/Nulton (1906-1999)

By Jane Feehan

Florida’s land boom made Northern bankers nervous during the early 1920s. Their banks were being drained of millions of dollars to fund Florida dreams. Bankers banded together to pay for ads in the New York Times and other newspapers warning about the dangers of speculation and likelihood of a bust.

Anxious to keep the money spigot open in 1925,  Florida Governor John W. Martin (1884-1958)  brought a group of respected businessmen to New York to downplay notions about speculation in a “Truth about Florida” meeting at the Waldorf Astoria with media and bankers.

Afterward, Florida businessmen established “Truth about Florida” committees to raise money to pay for advertisements in northern newspapers to counter bad publicity about the boom.

George E. Merrick (1886-1942), developer of Coral Gables, one of the first planned communities in the United States, announced in June, 1926 that his city would raise $1,000,000 “to get the message across to 110,000,000 people of the U.S.* that they should be informed of the real truth about Florida.”   He also suggested that the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce raise $1.5 million for the same cause. 

By the end of 1926, northern bankers ceased their ad campaign but the Truth about Florida committees could not claim success. Two hurricanes filled the Everglades with water, dampening dreams about development there and along the coast. The boom quickly receded like the seas before a dangerous tidal wave, taking with it the Truth about Florida campaign.

* Merrick also paid William Jennings Bryan $100, 000 to sell Coral Gables land. See:
https://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2020/08/silver-tongued-orator-william-jennings.html

 Burnett, Gene M. Florida’s Past: People and events that shaped the state. Sarasota: Pineapple Press (1997), p. 160.

Miami News, Nov. 13, 1925

Miami News, June 9, 1926

Wikipedia.org

Tags: South Florida in the 1920s, Florida history, South Florida real estate boom, George E. Merrick, Gov. John W. Martin, Jane Feehan, film researcher