Dr. Henry E. Perrine

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

Dr. Henry Edward Perrine is an important figure in the history of South Dade, though few know much about him, other than that he died in the Florida Keys in the mid-1800s. Many recognize the name Perrine, from the suburban area so-named, but know nothing about the person for whom it is named. In this article, I will attempt to provide a more comprehensive account of his life.

Perrine Plat 1903

Plat of the Town of Perrine – 1903

In the upper left corner of this plat is the signature of J. Denham Palmer, President, Perrine Grant Land Company. Palmer was the husband of Sarah Rogers Walker, one of Dr. Perrine’s grand-daughters.

Despite being a well-known figure during his lifetime and the fact that he counted a number of powerful and influential figures as friends, little is known about him. His son, Henry E. Perrine, Jr., born in New York on March 20, 1827, wrote a book in 1885 for his grandchildren entitled A True Story of Some Eventful Years in Grandpa’s Life.1 Henry was only 13 years old when his father was killed, but in his book, he used family letters and stories to pass on to his grandchildren what he knew of his family.

Dr. Perrine was born on April 5, 1797 in New Brunswick, NJ, the son of Peter Perrine (1771-1813) and Sally Rosengrant (1775-1832). Peter and Sally had six children: three sons and three daughters. Henry’s brother, John Allen Perrine, died in 1865. His brother, Edward M., born in 1807, died in 1828. One of his sisters, Mary Ann, died at the age of two. His other two sisters, Sarah Ann and Henrietta Elizabeth, never married and died in Philadelphia.2

In his book, Henry E., Jr., wrote that he knew little of his father’s education, other than that at the age of 17, he taught school in Rocky Hill, NJ.3 Henry, Jr. relied on letters between his father and others and family stories as he related the family history. In one of them, written on November 15, 1819 from near Ripley in Bond County, IL to his uncle Henry, a brother of his father Peter, Dr. Perrine stated that he and a Dr. Drake had set out for the frontier from New Jersey on July 21. In that letter, he stated that he had set up his practice on September 30 in his boarding house, named Jersey Grove, located between Ripley (now known as Old Ripley) and Greenville in Bond County, IL. 4

In 1820, his future wife’s family, the Townsends, settled not far from where Dr. Perrine’s boarding house was. They named their new home Townsend’s Prairie.5 His wife, Ann Fuller Townsend, was 18 years old. Her parents were Rev. Jesse Townsend (1766-1838), and Ann May (1762-1846), who was a descendant of an old and prominent family in New England. Ann Townsend was, Henry wrote, an attractive young lady courted by many young men. But his father won her heart and they became engaged in the summer of 1821.

In the afternoon of September 19, 1821, one of Dr. Perrine’s students, a Mr. Pickett, weighed out “a quantity of white arsenic (ratsbane), which he placed in a measure glass, with the intention of speedily removing it.” He didn’t remove it, though. Perrine, in a hurry to leave to attend to some patients, did not pay much attention to what his student had done. Having attended to the patients he left for, Perrine stopped for the night at the house of Richard White. The next morning, he was roused by a Mr. Hunt to attend to his daughter, who lived on “Beaver Creek, six or seven miles distant.” Having only recently recovered from a severe attack of dysentery, for which he took quinine in the form of Peruvian Bark powder every morning, he stopped at his shop “to procure some necessary articles,” placed some Peruvian Bark powder in the measuring glass that Mr. Pickett had left the arsenic in, “stirred it up with some whiskey to wet it and swallowed nearly the whole.”6 He nearly died as a result.

Ann Townsend nursed his father back to health and after he had recovered, she and Henry were married at her father’s house on January 8, 1822.7 Their first daughter, Sarah Ann, was born on March 24, 1823.

In that era, doctors very commonly recommended that their patients move to warmer climates to recover their health. A little over two and a half years after his bout with arsenic poisoning, The Edwardsville Spectator, in Edwardsville, IL, published Perrine’s announcement that he would be leaving the state on about April 25th, 1824.8 He relocated to Natchez, MS and treated a number of patients there in late 1825 by giving them quinine pills and bleeding them.9

Perrine’s second daughter, Hester Maria Smith, was born on July 21, 1824 in Illinois. She was named after a maiden lady of the same name who took care of Perrine during yet another bout of illness he suffered while in Natchez.10 11

The historical record does not provide any insights into how Dr. Perrine came to be so interested in what is now known as economic botany. After suffering several bouts of severe illness in Illinois and in Mississippi, Perrine may have decided to change careers. In the spring of 1826, Henry travelled to Cuba, where he “was driven by sickness”12 and wrote a detailed report that calculated “the representative capital of the agriculture and rural industry of Cuba, their product and net income.”13 He may have returned to Natchez – we don’t know. But later in 1826, seeking a warmer climate, Perrine applied for the position as U. S. Consul in Campeche, Yucatan, the capital city of the Mexican state of Campeche. His application was approved in January of 1827.14 He arrived in Campeche in June of 1827.15

The consular service in the United States was legally established by an act of Congress on April 14, 1792. That act stipulated that consuls were to attend to American shipping matters, take temporary possession of the estates of American citizens dying in their area if there was no other legal representation, take charge of stranded American ships and protect their cargoes, and collect fees for certain acts. Consuls were not paid by the U.S. government and one result of this was that there was no training or experience required for the position.

The job of Consul in Campeche required diplomacy and was sometimes life-threatening. In the mid-1820s, political issues began to surface that would develop into a civil war in Yucatan16 by the mid-1830s. This ongoing conflict made Perrine’s job difficult. Consular dispatches from Perrine from 1828 to 1836, archived by the National Archives and Records Administration, cast some light on the obstacles Perrine encountered in his job. In 1828, Perrine sent a letter to B. Chew, Collector of the Port of New Orleans, informing him that the Governor of the State of Campeche refused to allow any Spaniards to set foot on shore after the ship they were on docked at Campeche.17 In 1835, because of an incident involving the brig Ajax, Perrine was “compelled to keep within doors, barricaded and armed, apprehending an attack. He wrote to an unnamed person in “a highly respectable house” of merchants in New Orleans that if he had his affairs in order, he would escape “this night from the risk of death to which I am exposed … Should not a vessel of war relieve us in a few days, neither Captain Brittingham nor myself can expect any mercy from these despots.”18 On April 22, 1836, Perrine notified the Department of State that he would leave Campeche for New Orleans “on the first safe vessel.” That message reflected his desperation to escape a very dangerous situation. However, his successor, Peyton Gay, had not yet arrived 19 and so he did not leave. On October 4, 1836, he wrote a letter to a Mr. Ellis regarding the impressment of American seamen at Campeche.20

While Consul in Campeche, he essentially devoted his life to collecting plant material for his project to establish what we would now call a plant introduction station. In his Consular dispatches, Perrine mentioned his compensation and his desire to establish a nursery for the introduction of tropical plants to the United States in southern Florida.21 In a lengthy, angry and bitter letter to the editor of the Farmer’s Register in January of 1840, he went into great detail about the obstacles he had faced. In it, he stated that the federal government did everything it could possibly do to squelch his project.22

Perrine began what would become the central focus of his life by following the directives given by Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury Department, in a circular dated September 6, 1827, which instructed “a portion of the American Consuls” to comply with a directive of President John Q. Adams to collect “all such trees and plants from other countries, not heretofore known in the United States, as may give promise, under proper cultivation, of flourishing and becoming useful, as well as superior varieties of such as are already cultivated here.23 “Dr. Perrine [was] the only one who had taken any effectual measures to promote its objects by acquiring useful intelligence concerning the various valuable plants abounding in his consular district …”24 Driven by his passion for collecting useful plants, Perrine, a medical doctor, treated the indigenous peoples for free as a way to encourage them to cooperate with him in gathering seeds and seedlings.25 Perrine never became wealthy during his appointment as Consul. That was attested to by Ezekiel P. Johnson and George Clark in supporting letters in Perrine’s petition for a grant of a township of land in South Florida to introduce tropical plants.26

“After four years of fruitless effort,” Perrine returned to the United States in late 1831 to create support for his plans. He sent a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, dated Nov. 8, 1831, which was shared with the governor of Florida. That communication resulted in an act being passed unanimously by the legislative council of the Territory of Florida calling for the creation of the Tropical Plant Company of Florida. On February 6, 1832, Perrine addressed Congress and on April 26, a bill was introduced “to encourage the introduction and promote the cultivation of tropical plants in the United States.” That bill never made it to the floor for a vote and Perrine, disheartened, returned to Campeche. In early 1833, Perrine learned that “several valuable plants” he had sent to Key West via Havana had survived and had been sent to John Dubose, the keeper of the Cape Florida lighthouse on Key Biscayne.27 Perrine’s daughter Hester, in a letter to the editor of the Florida Agriculturalist,28 wrote that her father had sent 7 agave plants in 1837 from Yucatan to Florida. One was planted at Key West and five were planted on “the Indian hunting ground” at Biscayne Bay.29

On December 28, 1835, the Seminoles attacked the New River lighthouse and killed the wife and children of William Cooley, the keeper. He was not present, so he escaped death. “The only survivor of the massacre, a young slave boy, managed to reach the ‘Cape Florida Settlement’ and warn the people there.”30 Accompanied by John Dubose, the lightkeeper at Cape Florida, the residents there, along with the “young slave boy,” sailed to Indian Key and then to Key West, arriving on January 15, 1836.31 Perrine, apprised of the situation, wrote that “the progeny of said tropical plants were necessarily left to propagate themselves.”32

By the spring of 1837, Perrine thought that the 2nd Seminole War would soon be over33 and decided to leave his post as Consul at Campeche.34 He sailed from Campeche on January 28, 1837, arriving in New Orleans on February 11. His son, Henry, Jr., wrote that his father narrowly escaped shipwreck on that voyage.35 He wanted to go directly to the area of Cape Florida but since that wasn’t possible, he sailed for Havana on June 5, leaving there on the 15th and arriving in Key West on the 17th.36 Due to the hostile Indians, he was unable to go to the mainland and so he left his plants in the care of Charles Howe on Indian Key on August 5, 1837.37

With the support of the Agricultural Societies of Louisiana and South Carolina, he proceeded to Washington, D.C. to continue his lobbying efforts for the grant of the tract of land. In February of 1838, he obtained a new act of incorporation for the Tropical Plant Company of Florida and finally, on July 7, 1838, Congress awarded him the township of land he had been seeking for the past 8 years.

At this time, Perrine did not yet have what he termed a “preparatory nursery” established. Beginning in August of 1833, he had shipped plants in wooden boxes38 to Indian Key to later be removed “to the main land, when the Seminole war shall cease.” By 1839, Perrine had accumulated “upwards of 200 species and varieties.”39 His daughter Hester listed the species in a letter to the editor of the Florida Agriculturalist.40 Her list was a subset of a much longer list published as part of the petition Perrine submitted to Congress.41

After succeeding in obtaining the conditional grant of a township of land from Congress, Perrine went home to Palmyra, NY to be with his family. Shortly after his father-in-law, Rev. Jesse Townsend, died42 on August 14, 1838, Perrine and his family set out for Indian Key. They traveled by canal boat and other means of transportation from Palmyra to New York, where they boarded the “hermaphrodite brig Lucinda”43 in mid-December. On Christmas Day, 1838, they reached Indian Key.44

Little is known about Perrine’s activities once he reached Indian Key, but it is likely he concentrated on developing his nursery on West Matecumbe (now known as Lower Matecumbe). He also made a number of exploratory trips to the Cape Sable area, where he hoped to have his grant located. On June 17, 1840, he wrote to James Whitcomb, the Commissioner of the United States General Land Office, requesting a survey be made of land lying “along the south coast of the peninsula, eastward of Cape Sable, or of the projecting land called Punta Tancha on Spanish charts, and northward of the Sandy Islands, of which one is called Cayo Axi on several charts.” In response, Whitcomb, in a letter dated June 29, 1840, wrote to Robert Butler, Esq., Surveyor-General in Tallahassee, requesting that he have the survey made at “your earliest convenience.”45 It is very unlikely that survey was ever made. In a letter to Dr. Ralph Glover in New York City, dated July 17, 1840, Perrine wrote that he hoped, before the next mail, to have “growing in Everbloom Prairie a few plants of every kind known in the preparatory nursery on West Matecumbie.” In that letter, he also wrote that in the last week of April “Mr. Howe, myself and our children … planted M. M. [Manilla Mulberry] on the northwest Cape and the Middle Cape, or Cape of Royal Palms; and obtained abundant fresh water by digging four feet within one hundred fifty yards of the sea.”46

Perrine was making substantial progress towards achieving his dream when he was killed just three weeks later in a raid on Indian Key led by the Seminole Chief Chekika on August 7, 1840. He was 43. A great deal has been written about that event and the reader is encouraged to read the numerous and sometimes conflicting accounts about it to better understand what happened. The story, which involves Jacob Houseman, a notorious wrecker, the 2nd Seminole War and a good portion of politics centering on Key West, is much more complicated than it first appears.
______________________________________________________________________

John S. Frederick

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

The Town of Homestead, which was surveyed and platted by J. S. Frederick, C. E.,1 in June, 1904, was the next to the last community created by the arrival of the Florida East Coast Railway on mainland Florida. Incorporated in 1913, it is the second-oldest municipality in what is now Miami-Dade County. The last community, originally known as Detroit, incorporated in 1914, is the third-oldest municipality in the county. When Frederick platted the Town of Homestead, Miami-Dade County (known as Dade County until November 13, 1997) covered the area from Stuart south to just below Lake Surprise.

Town of Homestead

Plat of the Town of Homestead

Title Block.

John Stanley Frederick was born on June 24, 1853 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,2 the son of Thomas E. and Martha June Gilbert Frederick. John’s father was a merchant of quite modest means. In 1860, he had a real and personal estate of $2,000 which by 1870 had decreased to just $1,800. One of four children, John had a sister, Alice M. and a brother, William C. Another sister, Susan, born in 1851, apparently died between 1860 and 1870. The family moved around quite a bit: in October of 1850, shortly after his marriage to Martha on June 20 in Cuyahoga County, OH, Thomas, a merchant, was about 70 miles away, staying in a hotel in Centre Township, Columbiana County, OH. In 1860, he was in Champaign County, IL and in 1870, he was in Cumberland County, NJ. By 1880, he had moved to Baltimore, an independent city in Baltimore County, MD.3

Nothing is known about John’s education but in May of 1876, at the young age of 23, he was admitted to the bar in Baltimore, Maryland. From then until 1889, he practiced law, was active in civic affairs and sold real estate there.4

On September 6, 1883, he married Antoinette Elizabeth Gazzam in Utica, NY.5 The Gazzam family was very prominent in Pittsburg, PA and in Utica, NY. Antoinette’s father, Audley William, was a lawyer who specialized in bankruptcy. Antoinette had 3 sisters and one brother: Mary Van Deusen, Edwin Van Deusen, Irene Gilbert and Maria Florence. In late 1889, John and his wife, their two children, Edwin Stanley and Florence Antoinette, and his sister-in-law, Maria Florence, moved to Cartersville, Georgia.6 He may have continued practicing law there. Two more children were born to John and Antoinette in Cartersville: Thomas Emanuel on December 17, 1890 and Audley William, on March 16, 1894.7

As the construction of the F.E.C. Railway made its way down the coast, thousands of merchants, laborers and professionals of all kinds, including engineers, moved to Florida to improve their families’ prospects. John Frederick may have been one of them. It is unknown when he and his family left Cartersville to journey to Dade County, but it probably wasn’t before the spring of 1895, as Audley William was just an infant then.

Eugene Dearborn may have been another. He was born on June 5, 1859 in Mason County, IL.8 In the mid-1880s, the Dearborns lived in Wayne, NE, where Eugene taught school and worked for a railroad company.9 The F.E.C. Railway reached Titusville in February, 189310 and on August 14, 1893, the Dearborns’ daughter, Dora, was born there.11 It is possible that Dearborn worked for the F.E.C. Railway. By early 1894, the family had moved to Cocoanut Grove, where Eugene Dearborn’s father, Marcellus, purchased the SE 1/4 of 10-54-41 on July 24, 1894.12

Frederick’s first residence was in Cocoanut Grove,13 where he and Eugene C. Dearborn entered into a partnership, Frederick & Dearborn, selling real estate. They placed their first advertisement, stating that they were the “authorized agent for the sale of the Brickell (South Side) lots, the most desirable residence portion of Miami,” on June 5, 1896.14 Their “well-equipped office” was on 18th St., south of the Miami River, east of Avenue D.15

MM, May 14, 1897, p. 3.

Advertisement for Frederick & Dearborn16

By early 1897, John had moved his family to 20th St. and Avenue D, then known as Southside.17 His house, “The Wayside Cottage,” was located 2 blocks south of the Miami River.18

In May of 1897, the Dearborns moved into their new 11-room stone home in Cocoanut Grove, erected on 3 acres near the residences of the Trapps and W. W. Culbertson.19 In July of that year, he offered it for sale or exchange, along with the 160 acre homestead purchased by his father, Marcellus, one mile north of his house.20 In 1900, he had it subdivided into 16 ten-acre lots.21 Shenandoah Middle School is located on a portion of that property.

By July of 1897, Frederick and Dearborn had parted.22 That was likely because Frederick was very busy with surveying jobs. How John Frederick made the transition from being a lawyer to a civil engineer is unknown but he may have learned the fundamentals from Abner L. Knowlton, who surveyed the town of West Palm Beach in 1893,23 the Town of Ft. Lauderdale in 1895,24 and the City of Miami in 1896.25 John S. Frederick and Lewis R. Ord assisted Knowlton on the latter survey.

Plat of Miami.

Plat of the City of Miami

Knowlton was an experienced civil engineer who was born in New Hampshire in 1818, served the North in the Civil War and did surveying work for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Washington state before coming to Jacksonville after 1891.26 The plat of the town of Fort Lauderdale was ordered by William and Mary Brickell while the plat of the City of Miami was ordered by William and Mary Brickell, Julia D. Tuttle, Henry M. Flagler and the Ft. Dallas Land Co. in cooperation with the State of Florida.27 28 Both of these projects covered a lot of area and Knowlton had his two assistants to help him. No doubt, there were many more rodmen, chainmen and transitmen working on these jobs but their names have been lost to history.

After Frederick completed his work with Knowlton in early 1896, he embarked on his new career as a civil engineer. In June of 1897, he had “a large contract for surveying certain land owned by Julia D. Tuttle at New River, at which place he has a camp and a force of men and a large houseboat.”29 By the end of 1897, Frederick had completed four large jobs and had also completed the work necessary to move the route of the road from Miami to Coconut Grove some distance west to get it off the property of William Fuzzard. Fuzzard had posted notice in July that effective Sept. 1, the road, which ran through his property, would be closed to public travel.30 Frederick’s surveying work was in lieu of a monetary donation to the cost of building the road, to which fifty-six individuals and companies, along with the Dade County Commission, had contributed.31

In 1898, he was elected as alderman for the City of Miami32 and was also appointed Deputy U. S. Engineer and tasked with surveying the Ragged Keys, which are a few miles north of the northern tip of Key Largo.33 Starting in June of 1899, he subdivided about 1,000 acres of land northwest of the Little River area into 10-acre tracts for the Land Department of F.E.C. Railroad.34 In August, he went to Cutler “to finish sub-dividing into 10-acre tracts certain lands of the Perrine Grant, which work was commenced some 30 days since.”35

John Frederick filed a claim for the SW corner of Bauer Dr. and Richard Rd. on August 5, 1902 and relinquished it on April 5, 1904. His sister-in-law, Maria Florence Gazzam, claimed her homestead at the NW corner of Waldin Dr. and Richard Rd., adjacent to John’s claim, on the same day as her brother-in-law. She patented her claim on December 3, 1905, shortly after marrying George W. Kosel in August of that year. George had claimed the NW corner of Redland Rd. and Plummer Dr. in July of 1902.

Junius T. Wigginton claimed a homestead at the southeast corner of Bauer and Redland on July 17, 1904. He married Frederick’s daughter, Florence, in Lexington, KY on November 30, 1905.36 His claim was one mile east of the claim of his wife’s aunt, Alice Frederick, who had married Harry LeForest Hill.37 Alice and John’s mother, Martha G. Frederick, died at Alice’s home on December 31, 1910.38 Alice went on to marry Erich B. Grutzbach, another pioneer in the Redlands, who claimed a homestead in 1908 at the NW corner of Bauer and SW 207th Ave, one mile west of Alice’s claim. They were married in 1911 in Buena Vista.39

In late June of 1902, John Frederick was hired by the F.E.C. to do a survey of the lands south of the Miami River and supervised a large crew of men which worked until early September.40 Frederick then went to St. Augustine to discuss his work with Joseph R. Parrott, who was the vice-president and general counsel of the railroad. After their meeting, Frederick, who was “very glad the first work through the Everglades [was] finished,” returned to Miami and began working on the “surveying work which had piled up enormously during his absence.”41

That the F.E.C. had planned to continue past Miami is evident by studying the plat of the City of Miami, started by Knowlton with the assistance of John S. Frederick and Lewis R. Ord in late 1895. The survey, which reserved land for the continuation of the railway south of the Miami River between Avenues E and F, is evidence of those plans.42 Frederick’s report was discussed at the next meeting of the Board of Directors43 and the decision was made to advertise for someone to continue the survey that Frederick had started. William J. Krome was hired and he began his Cape Sable Exploration Survey on October 5, 1902.44 and completed it on May 31, 1903.45 Krome submitted his survey to the Clerk of Courts of Dade County in June of 1903 and it was filed for record on July 8, 1903.

Cape Sable Exploration Survey.

William J. Krome’s 1903 Cape Sable Exploration Survey

In November, James E. Ingraham, the 3rd vice-president of the F.E.C., made a trip to South Dade to look over the country and make further plans after Krome’s report had been reviewed. He was accompanied on his tour by William J. Krome, John S. Frederick, Fred S. Morse, who was the land agent for the Model Land Co., and Edward A. Graham,46 who was the captain of Ingraham’s yacht, the Enterprise,47 and a photographer. This is a photograph, taken by Graham, of the party on their way to Paradise Key, which would become Royal Palm State Park in 1916:

Camping Trip to Long Key.

Courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

Ingraham selected 600 acres of land in section 13, township 56 (sic – 57), range 38 to be used by the F.E.C. for buildings, yards and other terminal purposes.48

“Other terminal purposes” included a town, which came to be named Homestead and which was surveyed and platted by John S. Frederick. After completing that work, Frederick returned to Miami to work on the many surveying jobs he was being asked to do. By 1904, he had so much work that he hired his son, Edwin Stanley “Ted” Frederick, to help him.49 By 1906, with his business continuing to grow, John entered into a partnership with Clarence L. Barclay, who came down from Johnstown, PA in November. Frederick renamed his business Frederick & Barclay50 but unfortunately, that partnership did not last long, for Barclay left and went back to Johnstown the following March.51

John S., E. S., or both created 43 out of the 166 plats in Book B, which is just over 25% of the total. In 1909, E. S. Frederick formed a partnership with George O. Butler and the firm, Butler & Frederick,52 became “one of the most active engineering firms on the east coast,” according to John’s obituary.53 Butler was a surveyor and politician who is known as the father of Palm Beach County.54

John S. Frederick died on February 26, 1910 at the age of 53. He came down with a bad cold as a result of wading in waist-deep water while on a job near Ft. Pierce. That developed into pleurisy which resulted in his death. His widow, who had moved to Moore Haven to be near her sons Ted and Audley, died in 1922 in Daytona. Both are buried in the Miami City Cemetery.
______________________________________________________________________

The Cedars

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

The Cedars, South Dade’s earliest farming venture, was named for the Australian pine (casuarina equisetifolia), commonly referred to as a cedar.

1912, Charles T. Simpson wrote this about the tree:

“A strange tree is casuarina equisetifolia or Beefwood, which has escaped cultivation in extreme South Florida. It looks a little like a very slender, vigorous white pine, but on close inspection the branchlets look like miniature scouring bushes. It is a most astonishingly rapid grower and like many rapid growing tropical trees it has hard wood. It is being used here considerably for planting along roads, where it does well, but to me it is very dreary-looking and suggests snow and ice. It has become naturalized on lower Biscayne Bay over quite a wide area which, in consequence, has been called ‘The Cedars.’ It is a native of the Australian region.”1

In 1946, Dr. John C. Gifford wrote “‘There are many old casuarinas in South Florida. On the seashore of Biscayne Bay, not far from Homestead, there was a group of them called ‘The Cedars’. For sailors these striking trees formed a landmark that was conspicuous for a long distance. They were the leftovers of an old nursery which had obtained the seed from Cuba.”2

This farm was started before 1897 by Joseph Jennings, who was born in 1865 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the son of Benjamin Franklin Jennings and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Grandy.3 Little is known of him other than that he had 2 sisters and 3 brothers. He made his first appearance in the Miami Metropolis in September of 1897 when it was noted that he was going to “plant 30 acres of tomatoes this winter.”4

In early Miami, concern was expressed about who would feed the growing population. In October of 1897, an unidentified person wrote to the editor of the Miami Metropolis, asking, “What is going to support Miami? Well, there is a chap named Jennings down the Bay, who has fifteen men at work raising a crop of 20,000 crates of tomatoes.”5 This appeared in the newspaper after it became known that Joseph Jennings, “of Cocoanut Grove,” had met a party of “14 white men from Georgia” under contract to him to work “all winter on his immense tomato farm. He will plant over 50 acres and expects to clear at least $20,000.”6 Charles J. Peacock, the captain of the schooner Rowena,7 took the men down to Cutler, where they stayed at the Richmond Inn and spent the night before being “transported to the scene of their coming labors” at “the Cedars, the fine plantation of J. Jennings.”8 The following June, a Tampa newspaper reported that “Joseph Jennings of Cocoanut Grove shipped from twelve acres planted in tomatoes 6,000 crates and from ten acres of Irish potatoes he shipped 250 barrels.”9

Joseph Jennings was enumerated in the 1900 census of Precinct 4 (Cocoanut Grove), which covered the area from 20th St., south of the Miami River, down to Cutler. He was single but Harry R. Peacock boarded with him.10 In that census, Joseph’s occupation was given as “trucker” and Harry’s as “boatman.”

Jennings was not the only man farming at The Cedars. In 1901, Ernest Beaty and Cleve Morgan, from Hamilton County, Florida, put “in ten acres of tomatoes at ‘The Cedars,’ twelve miles below Cutler. They are sure to make 600 crates to the acre and in the market every crate will be worth from $1.00 to $3.50 a crate; so you can figure for yourself that the ten acres will beat any 80 acres of long cotton.”11 This was in the Cutler column and was written by the editor of the Jasper News, which was published in Jasper, Hamilton County, FL. Later in the column, he gave the names of some of the Hamilton County people in Dade County: Cato Friar, Mack Morgan and Janie and Beatrice Simpson. Janie “married a prosperous butcher named Ullendorf and Beatrice, who was the widow Johns when she left here, has married a prosperous farmer named Sheritt.” Phillip Ullendorf owned a butcher shop in Miami and Charles Sherritt was a member of William J. Krome’s Cape Sable Exploration Survey in 1902-1903.

In 1902, J. C. Gallaher planted “a crop of tomatoes at the Cedars, a place south of Cutler where there are quite a number of growers located…He talks encouragingly of the magnificent crop prospects down there.”12 Other farmers mentioned in connection with The Cedars were Capt. A. F. McCully,13 Mr. McMurray14 and Rooney & Harden.15

An advertisement by the Miami Land & Development Co., published in the South Florida Banner in 1914, stated that grapefruit, orange and other fruit trees would thrive on their land, as proven by ” … the old nursery grove at the Cedars that has been growing in a wild state, without care or cultivation or fertilizer or attention for several years.”16

And there were the usual social incidents – The Cedars was no paradise: “Sam Brown, a negro who shot Jesse Washington, another negro, last Wednesday week, the latter dying Saturday of his wounds, was given a preliminary hearing Monday before justice R. M. Smith and held over to the May term of the circuit court. The shooting occurred at The Cedars, thirty miles down the bay.” 17

The Cedars was an important source of fruit, vegetables and fish as late as the summer of 1905. A Capt. Miller, otherwise unidentified, visited “his vegetable farm at the Cedars” in 1905.18 The George Washington, a schooner owned by Gilbert Johnson, took a load of “tomatoes and vegetables” to Miami on May 25 and in July, Johnson took a load of “Biscayne Bay sponges” to Miami to be sold.19 Also in July,”young Johnson,” presumably Gilbert’s son, sold “229 pounds of fish” which consisted of “angel and mutton fish, podies (sic – pogies), groupers and grunt, all caught with hook and line.”20

After 1905, cropping at The Cedars seems to have declined due to competition from farmers further inland. With the availability of railroad transportation, it was not economically feasible to sail from The Cedars to Miami to sell fish and vegetables. It was mentioned occasionally as a destination for bathing and fishing or because the land was part of a real estate transaction.

Jennings’ name made the papers in the summer of 1906 over his acquisition of 59,980 acres of land northwest of Flamingo, in Monroe County. He paid the Florida Internal Improvement Fund 41 2/3 cents per acre and then flipped it to the Palgrove Land Co. in New Jersey for $1.00 per acre, making a quick $34,988.34 profit.21 That did not go over well with the general public and Jennings left Florida, apparently, for no further trace of him has been found. Jennings may have sold his Dade County holdings to John Brand, of Elmira, NY at about this time.22 Brand was a prominent wholesale tobacco dealer and director of the Chemung Canal Trust Co. in Elmira and a director of the Miami Telephone Co. and the First National Bank in Miami.23 In 1910, The Cedars, which consisted of 2,600 acres “of beautiful prairie land lying on the coast below Cutler,” was sold to a Chicago syndicate.24

While The Cedars was mentioned in newspaper accounts, its location was never specified. The first clue as to its location appeared in a description of the route of two roads requested by Charles Gossman and 45 other men in 1901. They asked to have a road built from the intersection of Silver Palm Dr. and SW 117th Avenue east to “to the head of ordinary boat navigation on Black Point Creek in Township 56 S Range 40 E so as to give them a dry outlet and a short road to the bay.”25 They also requested a road to be built “from Cutler south and to the Cedars neighborhood following a generally Southwesterly course along the first pine reef from Cutler through Sec. 35-55-40 and 3-9-826 and 17-56-4027 to a junction with the road first aforesaid 28 and then Southward along the line between Townships 56-39 and 56-40 and between Townships 51 – 3929 and 57-40, or as near as may conveniently be to obtain a dry location, to a point to the head of Jennings drainage canal extended to the pine…”30 The line between ranges 39 and 40 is SW 117th Ave. The reason for their request was because the railroad had not yet been extended into South Dade and a route to the mouth of Black Point Creek would enable the farmers to get their crop to market.


The 1903 F.E.C. Land Map

This is a portion of the map of the land holdings of the F.E.C. Railway, drawn in December of 1903. The diagonally hatched portion of the map indicates land owned by either the Model Land Co. or the F.E.C. Railway. Black Point Creek was located 2 miles below the southern border of the Perrine Grant. The line between sections 16 and 17 and 20 and 21 is Silver Palm Drive. That portion of Silver Palm, if it was ever built, no longer exists.

How do we know that this was the location of Jennings’ plantation? Because in 1904, a hurricane struck just south of Miami and destroyed the house of Capt. Gilbert Johnson, who lived at The Cedars. An account of his experience was published in the Miami Evening Record on October 21.31 He told the Record reporter that the storm surge rose to eight feet and washed all of his household goods away. He and his family took shelter in his schooner, the George Washington, “which was heavily anchored in a canal in the prairie.” His fishing smack, the Henry Lee, was driven a mile inland, cutting a swath through the cedars as it went.”32

A close study of an aerial photograph taken for the Miami-Dade County Office of the Property Appraiser shows a thin line of vegetation that marks the location of the Jennings Canal. It runs along SW 312th St. (Campbell Drive) west from Biscayne Bay to about SW 107th Avenue. This canal runs on a line dividing sections 8 and 9 to the north side and sections 16 and 17 on the south side in township 57-40.

The Cedars, which was a substantial piece of property, may have extended as far south as S.W. 344th St., east of Florida City, because in 1911, William H. Hardin, a brother of Otis A. Hardin, who was an early merchant in Detroit, was “placed in charge of a big ditcher and has gone to Miami to lighter it down to Cedars where he will disembark and cut ditches towards Detroit.”33

The Jennings Canal runs through the middle of this aerial photograph of the area. Note the faint outlines of the farm fields, marked by the vertical vegetation lines, that once existed there. Those who farmed there have been almost entirely forgotten. It is not widely known, but the marl lands of the East Glade, from the property of John Ehrehart and that of William S. Burkhart on the north down to the lands owned by the Miami Land & Development Co. of Detroit were where the first fruit and vegetable crops, sent to Eastern markets during the winter months, were planted. As the lands west of the F.E.C. railroad were cleared of their native pines and associated vegetation, the farmers abandoned their fields near the bay and moved to the former high pineland.

The Cedars, which was widely known as late as the late 1920s, has been completely forgotten. Such is the sad state of the “collective memory” of South Florida. But, as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
_____________________________________________________________________

William S. Burkhart

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

Some people are gullible and there have always been men and women willing to take advantage of that. South Florida, starting in the early 1890s, became a fertile ground for hucksters to pursue their vocations. Convincing people to come to a place that never experienced frost, where you could get rich by growing fruits and vegetables without fertilizer or work other than digging holes for the plants and where every sick person would to be restored to glowing health simply by moving here was the story that was told by hundreds of promoters. William S. Burkhart was among them. His specialty was patent medicine, what today is called “alternative medicine” by those who recoil in fervent protest at being called quacks or purveyors of snake oil.

William Sherman Burkhart was born on April 6, 18621 in Hubbard Springs, Lee County, Virginia.2 His father, Noble C. Burkhart, was a farmer of very modest means, owning real estate worth $550 and having a personal estate of $300 in 1870.4 His son was educated in the local schools and attended Cumberland College5 in Rose Hill, also in Lee County.6 Cumberland College was more than a high school but less than a college. On January 1, 1889, he married Mary L. Dishman,7 the daughter of a shoemaker in Washington County, Virginia.8 At the time of his marriage, Burkhart was a “fruit agent,”9 what was later known as a commission man – the middleman between farmers and wholesalers. His wife died in 1922 of breast cancer and is buried in Spring Garden Cemetery in Cincinnati. Burkhart then married Lenora Schenk Forney on June 20, 1923. Lenora’s first husband, Stehman Forney, was a very well-known civil engineer who worked for the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for over 50 years. He died in New York City in 1916.

Burkhart, who was not a medical doctor nor did he have any formal education in that field, took advantage of what has been termed the Golden Age of Patent Medicines.10 The social changes that occurred in this country after the Civil War, which included the rapid industrialization of the country, an increasingly urban population which lacked the herbal knowledge passed down by women for centuries, the lack of laws that would rein in purveyors of quack cures and the proliferation of newspapers and magazines as sources of information were all to the benefit of Burkhart and his fellow quacks. In the late 19th century and well into the 20th, he was known to millions, world-wide, for his patent medicine concoctions guaranteed to cure every ailment known to mankind. Today, no one other than his parents’ descendants know who he was.

One of his most heavily advertised concoctions was Dr. Burkhart’s Vegetable Compound:

Dr Burkhart s Vegetable Compound Front

Dr Burkhart s Vegetable Compound Back

Courtesy of the National Museum of American History11

He sold many others, as shown in this page from a promotional pamphlet he sent to his sales women and men:

Page 1

Patent medicines were so named because they were originally “manufactured under grants, or ‘patents of royal favor’, to those who provided medicine to the Royal Family” in England.12 The history of patent medicines, which are still sold today but under the name of alternative medicines, is quite interesting.

He introduced his Vegetable Compound on January 1, 189113 and went on to advertise his product nationwide.14 During this time, he also sailed to Europe semi-annually to attend to his factories in London, Paris and Germany.15 His sales amounted to half-a-million dollars a year.16

He first came to Miami to spend the winter in 1905.17 Here, he found a thriving market for his patent medicines that he guaranteed would restore anyone to vibrant health. Encouraged by what he saw as a bright future in the Magic City, he, like many others, invested in real estate.

His first purchase was of 90 acres between NW 22nd and 27th Avenues and NW 20th and 23rd Streets that he purchased in 1911. 15 acres of the property was a grapefruit grove and the balance was planted in tomatoes, beans and pineapples.18 In 1915, taking advantage of the appreciation in prices due to the growing population in Miami, he platted the land as Dr. W. S. Burkhart’s Winter Gardens subdivison.19

He then purchased 120 acres of high pineland near Claus Vihlen’s property in the Eureka area (in section 3-56-39), possibly from John Austin Hall, who claimed that land as a homestead in 1905 and patented it in 1908.20 Burkhart also purchased 60 acres in the adjoining section, 34-55-39. He called this property Morning View.21

On February 17, 1911,22 he “purchased 1,160 acres of land along the north side of Black Point Creek”23 through the Richardson Investment Co.24 Seminole Plains, the name he gave to that purchase, was east of Old Cutler Rd., south of John H. Ehrehart’s holdings and north of Black Point Creek. On that land, Burkhart’s share croppers grew cabbage, beans, cucumber, egg plant, tomatoes, potatoes, sugar cane and other crops for the market, transporting them to the packing houses at Perrine via Franjo Road and the Ingraham Highway, also known as East Dixie. That road is now known as Old Cutler.

Before 1909, Dade County had built a wooden bridge across Black Point Creek as part of building what is now known as Old Cutler. It burned down and Dade County did not rebuild it until some time after the end of 1911, when Burkhart complained that the County had not rebuilt it, leading prospective growers to not rent his property.25

On the map above, Old Cutler Road crossed what was then Black Point Creek, before it was transformed into Black Creek Canal C- 1, just west of the number 1 where the number 17 (section 17-56-40) is shown.

After that bridge was rebuilt, Burkhart’s sharecroppers had additional options to sell their crops to commission men in Goulds for shipment north on the F. E. C. railway.

On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt reluctantly signed into law the Pure Food and Drug Act. That law was an almost word-for-word copy of a law passed in Indiana in 1899 as the result of the work of Harvey W. Wiley.26 As with all laws seeking to control powerful people, it took many years, until 1927, when the Food and Drug Administration was created, before the law resulted in making food and drugs safer for Americans. The passage of the law did not slow Burkhart down. From 1907 to 1925, he advertised even more heavily and in more states than he did from 1891 to 1906.27

In Miami, Burkhart applied the same sales techniques he had learned in promoting patent medicines to a new field: real estate, farm land and agricultural products. He fed the press a steady diet of claims that raise the eyebrows of those who read them now. Among them:

In November of 1912, Burkhart touted the high quality of the sugar cane he was growing at Seminole Plains, claiming that it was superior to that being imported from Cuba. Because of the quality, he announced plans to plant 1,000 acres of his land in sugar cane and build “a sugar mill to grind the output.”28 By October of the next year, Burkhart announced plans to plant 1,700 acres in sugar cane but admitted that only 60 acres had been planted.29

In 1913, he announced the formation of the Cooperative Plantation & Sales Co., managed by B. C. Jenkins, of Cincinnati. It would be formed to market the syrup produced from his sugar cane.30 A search on “B. C. Jenkins” in Cincinnati from 1900 to 1930 failed to return any hits.

In early 1914, he stated that “practically every store in the county has agreed to install Seminole Plains Syrup as its leading brand.”31

In late 1914, he said he was going to plant 1,200 acres in tomatoes, three times as much acreage as Tom Peters and one-quarter of the total acreage planted in the Homestead District that year.32

The Cooperative Plantation & Sales Co., which Burkhart claimed to have established in 1913, never incorporated, so in 1916, he announced the formation of the Cooperative Fruit & Vegetable Club, with Burkhart as president and E. H. Threadgill as secretary and treasurer. Allegedly, 80% of the stock was subscribed to, mostly by northern capital.33 No records were found for the Letters Patent for either one of these organizations.

In 1927, Burkhart started to grow papaya, which took off in popularity in 1928. Improved varieties of the plant were offered by the Sub Tropical Experiment Station on Brickell Avenue in Miami as early as 1913.34

He was one of many who grew papayas in Dade County. Burkhart said he built a factory capable of producing 10,000 pounds of papaya marmalade and crystallized papaya candy every day. That is 10,000 pounds of each product.35 In 1929, he stated that papaya syrup was “supplanting maple syrup for buckwheat cakes” in New England.36 However, he did have a store in downtown Miami, at 31 N.E. 1st Street, where some of his syrup, marmalade and candy was sold.37

In 1928, he claimed to have spent $100,000 ($3,107,788 in 2023 dollars) improving Seminole Plains in the previous year.38

His 180-acre papaya plantation was “protected by a six-foot dike constructed eight months ago” and had a pump capable of removing 500,000 gallons of water an hour. … Blocks two acres long and one acre wide checkerboard the plot and roads surround the blocks. Underlying strata of rock prevent the moisture of the four-foot deep soil from escaping. … In figuring out how to make the “papaya grow larger that it had heretofore been known to do in Florida,” he “hit upon the idea of blended soil. … Fortunately, he [had] every kind of soil needed on his own acres. He carries what he calls black diamond from the southeast corner of the plantation to blend with glade and marl; he brings red soil from his farm in Redlands to add to that and then he puts in some compost.”39

Burkhart was a consummate marketing person. After reading many newspaper accounts of his accomplishments, it is very difficult to accept much of it as truth. An accurate account of Burkhart’s activities, at any time, is difficult to determine solely by reading newspaper accounts about him. Almost all of the information in the newspaper articles reads like an advertisement, not objective reporting. Every statement of “fact” in those articles came from Burkhart. In none of the articles was any agricultural figure, well-known or not so well-known, mentioned. Dr. Johann Peterson, another quack who owned Bonita Grove on Hainlin Mill Dr., never mentioned Burkhart as a competitor – both grew papayas and both touted its health benefits.

In 1923, he put about 290 acres of his property on the market as the Seminole Plains subdivision to take advantage of the appreciation in real estate prices. He kept the balance of the property, farming potatoes and papayas.

Plat of Seminole Plains40

In about 1925, he established Royal Palm Gardens on a portion of his Seminole Plains property. By 1928, he said he had “100,000 small palms growing in lines as straight as an arrow and one mile long, beginning away back at the highway.” He also had a house on the property, “a creamy yellow cottage, built on the lines of the East Indian structure that is the parent of our American bungalow.” The house was located next to the East Dixie Highway and was adjacent to a slat house covering over two acres with another 450,000 palm trees. When he “finished planting his baby palms, there will be 500,000 in the gardens,” he told a reporter for the Miami Herald.41

The newspapers reported that he owned anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 acres of land, depending on what initiative he was promoting at the time the article was published. Tax delinquency lists published in 1929 show that he or family members owned at least 589 acres in sections 9, 16 and 17 of township 56 south, range 40 east.42 The holdings of the Campo Rico Farms were south and west of Burkhart’s holdings.

Burkhart had two children: Mary Mabel and William Shearman, born in 1896 and 1900 respectively. William S. continued to live in South Dade until at least 1935, when he and his family, who lived on Cadima Avenue in Coral Gables in 1940, told the enumerator they had lived in Goulds in 1935. His occupation in 1940 was as a “vegetable grower.”43 Burkhart cultivated potatoes on the family land and kept meticulous records, according to an article in the Miami Herald in 1936.44 By 1950, William and his family had moved to Ft. Lauderdale, where he became a real estate salesman.45 William’s children, Beverly and William, lived in the Orlando area and his son-in-law, James W. Olgivie, Jr., was a biochemistry professor at Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.46 Mary Mabel married Nobel Gildersleeve in 1918 and they lived in Philadelphia, where Gildersleeve was a wealthy executive of a ship-building company. They wintered in Miami Beach, where Noble was enumerated in the 1930 census as living in a house worth $30,000, a substantial sum at that time. His occupation was given as “stock broker.” Mabel died in 1962 and her husband in 1964. Both are buried in Portland, Connecticut.

In 1933, Burkhart furnished Dade County with free Canary Island Date Palms to landscape Franjo Rd.49 In another article that same year, he had a total of 50,000 Canary Island Date, Queen, Washingtonia, and Royal Palms,”in some directions extending in rows almost a mile long.”50

W. S. Burkhart rose from humble beginnings in the hills of Southwest Virginia, the eldest of 11 children, to a fortune unimaginable to his siblings and died at his home in Reading, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, on November 13, 1941. No trace remains of his sojourn in Dade County and not much more in Cincinnati. He is buried beside his first wife in the Spring Grove Cemetery.

His property here was sold off after his death. Some of it was purchased by G. Walter Peterson, a big potato grower in Goulds, and August Burrichter, another potato grower who lived in Homestead. John W. Campbell, another big grower in Goulds, probably purchased some of Burkhart’s property also. Once those sales were completed and his son had moved out of the area, the very wealthy man whose fortune was built on self-promotion and real estate speculation was quickly forgotten.

In my article about Franjo Road, I mentioned Burkhart at the end of the article. That is because Burkhart’s land adjoined John H. Ehrehart’s property. A substantial part of the Lakes By the Bay subdivision was built on land formerly owned by Burkhart.

This article is part of a series about the history of the land east of U. S. 1 from Cutler down to Florida City, a part of the history of South Dade that has not been addressed in print to the best of my knowledge.
______________________________________________________________________