The Story of Baile’s Road

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

If you grew up in Goulds or Princeton, you know where Baile’s Road is. For those who never ventured far from Homestead as a child, Baile’s Road joins U.S. 1 at about S.W. 224th St., where the NAPA store is located.

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For years, I drove by the intersection and occasionally turned on to the road and ventured east but I never knew the story behind the road. A small patch of pine rockland has been preserved just east of the highway, which makes for an initial scenic drive. The road angles south and east and then merges with Silver Palm Drive before it reaches Allapattah Road.

Viewing the past from our small nuclear families in 2018 prevents us from understanding how important the network of kinship ties that governed life on the frontier in early Dade County was. In this post, I hope to show you some of those relationships as they pertain to Baile’s Road.

Baile’s Road is named after John Charles Baile, who was born on December 27, 1859 in West Alexandria, Preble County, Ohio. He was the son of John and Sarah Lovina Williams Baile. In the 1900 census of Warrensburg, Johnson County, Missouri, he was enumerated with his wife, Rosie, 28, their daughter Hilda, 6, and their son Kenneth, 4. He was a farmer, like the vast majority of his neighbors.

Also living in Warrensburg were John Collins Christopher and his wife, Minnie Claire. She was a sister of John Charles Baile and her husband was a prominent real estate investor. Another person of interest in Warrensburg was Nancy Jane Baile Roop, the wife of Ezra Roop. Nancy was the older sister of John Charles (J. C.) Baile and the mother of John A. Roop, who figures into the story after J. C. came to Miami.

J. C. apparently came to Miami in about 1907 with his cousin, John A. Roop. They immediately started investing in real estate, buying the Richardson Grove in January 1908 from Charles O. Richardson, who was nearly 91 years old, for the very low price of $500. That sale caused a bit of a controversy at the time. The real estate agent in charge of the sale was J. H. Tatum, one of the Tatum Brothers who were behind the Miami Land & Development Co., the developers of Detroit (later Florida City) and who was a third cousin, once removed, to Russell F. Tatum, the first mayor of Homestead. By 1910, the former Richardson Grove was known as the Musa Isle Fruit Farm and it was owned by Baile & Roop. Baile’s brother-in-law, Joseph C. Christopher (husband of Baile’s sister Minnie) came to visit in 19081 and no doubt invested some of his money in Miami real estate and probably staked J. C. in some his ventures.

J. C. Baile hit the ground running when he arrived in Miami. He solicited funds from Miami businessmen to build a highway from downtown Miami up through the Gen. Samuel C. Lawrence estate, past the pumping station at the head of the Everglades and then connecting to the Allapattah Road.2 There was an Allapattah section in Miami before there was an Allapattah Road in South Dade. Baile, who lived in Lemon City, north of Miami, agreed to furnish the poles and place them if the Miami electric utility would furnish power to his part of town.3 In 1908, J. C. and Florence Haden of Cocoanut Grove (of Haden mango fame) worked together to send fruits and vegetables to the Michigan State Fair, held in Detroit from September 3 – 5.4 By the summer of 1909,5 J. C. was a director of the Subtropical Laboratory Association, which was formed to support the research station in Miami that had been supported by the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry. Funding for the station was eliminated after the 1906 hurricane that struck Miami and a severe freeze in December of that year. Another director of the Subtropical Laboratory Association was Walter Waldin, a prominent real estate investor and the brother of Bernhardt “Barney” A. Waldin of Homestead.

During this time period, J. C. acquired a tract of land east of Goulds from the Model Land Company that is variously given as anywhere from 400 to 1,000 acres. There were at least three people who were partners with Baile in this venture: William H. Owens, William L. Burch, and Thomas E. Cheatham. Who is associated with J. C. in his Baile Farm venture depends on which source is consulted. William H. Owens was a truck farmer who boarded with Charles W. Smith, who lived on 9th street in the 1910 census of Miami. Smith was a wealthy automobile dealer from Lawrence, Kansas who had 300 acres of tomatoes on the Baile Farm. William L. Burch was a truck (vegetable) farmer, who had retired from the Benner line, a merchant shipping line based in New York City. He built the launch Sallie and in 1903 “began regular excursions” up the Miami River. Thomas E. Cheatham owned a tailoring business in Miami and was the brother of J. Hubbard Cheatham, a wealthy merchant. They were natives of Viriginia and had come to Miami from Bartow, Florida in 1898 to serve the needs of the Spanish-American War soldiers in town at that time, according to an article by Howard Kleinberg published in the Miami News as the “363rd in a series of articles about early Miami.” The Cheathams lived in South Side, which, before it was taken over by the building boom of the early 2000s, was a wealthy residential area with numerous mansions west of Brickell and south of S.W. 8th St.

Baile very likely did not use much of his own money to finance his ventures, a tactic that was (and still is) very common.

By late 1909, the Campo Rico Trucking Company was advertising in the Miami Metropolis:6
Campo Rico

Farmers rented the land owned by J. C. Baile and his partners and grew tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, celery, beans and other crops for the Miami market and for shipment to the North. Among the farmers were William Ira Peters, a brother of tomato king Thomas J. Peters; Leon M. Fornell, who was born in France; Anderson Lee Allen, who was killed in 1922 in a train/truck accident; Charles W. Bush and John Strange. John Strange was an iron worker from Brooklyn who quit his job on the Key West Extension after the 1906 hurricane and settled in Goulds to become a supervisor for Campo Rico.

Campo Rico Tomatoes Peters Crew

A crew picking tomatoes for William I. Peters

Photo courtesy of Bob Jensen

J. C. Baile built a packing house at the corner of Baile’s Road and the County Road. The road was completed by late 1910 and just waiting for the County road roller to compact the surface.7 Baile’s packing house burned down in the 1920s. The packing house is shown on this plat of Goulds, from 1912. Click on the link under the image to download a larger version:

1912 Goulds

Plat of Goulds in 1912

The Baile Farm was in the East Glade, roughly between S.W. 248th St. on the south and S.W. 216 St. on the north. Baile built a 1.5 mile long narrow gauge tram line before 19118 to carry the produce from the field packing house at about Allapattah Road and Silver Palm Drive to the packing house near the depot in Goulds.

This is a photograph of the packing house on Allapattah Road:

Campo Rico Engine 1

Engine No. 1 was powered by a 5 1/2 horsepower Ferro marine engine, according to the October, 1911 issue of the magazine Motor Boating.

Photo courtesy of Bob Jensen

The packing house shown in this photograph was at the intersection of U.S. 1 and Baile’s Road:

Packing House

Photo courtesy of Bob Jensen

People were very resourceful in those days – this photograph shows Engine No. 2, which apparently was a converted automobile:

Campo Rico Engine 2 Depot

Photo courtesy of Bob Jensen

The Baile Farm struggled to be a successful farming venture. According to an article that appeared in The Country Gentleman in 1911,9 Baile had installed two drainage plants, each capable of moving 12,000 gallons of water a minute. But heavy rains overwhelmed them and destroyed farmers’ crops, a lesson not lost on the Tatum Brothers, who invested heavily in digging the Florida City and North (Michigan Avenue) canals from 1912 – 1914 to drain the land that their Miami Land and Development Company owned east of their planned community, Detroit.

0375 Baille Farms Pumping Plant

Photo courtesy of Bob Jensen

J. C. Baile was involved in many other ventures besides his farm in Goulds. He had an interest in the Biscayne Bay Company, which purchased land on Miami Beach that was later developed by Carl Fisher. As a County Commissioner, he was the prime mover behind the creation of the Goulds Drainage District, which funded the construction of the Goulds Canal. He was also in charge of the construction of what is now known as the McArthur Causeway.

Goulds, like Princeton, Naranja, Modello, Homestead and Florida City, has a very rich and complex history. This post and the two posts on Lyman B. Gould and the Beginnings of Goulds barely scratch the surface. It is not generally known, but two African-Americans, William Randolph and William Johnson, each claimed 160 acres that is now the heart of the African-American community in Goulds. Nor is the story of what is now Cauley Square very well known. It is a puzzle to me why the history of the area between Miami and the Keys has been ignored for so many years.
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The Glades of Youth

Historic South Dade Posted on by

I’m pleased to publish this piece about growing up in Homestead in the 1950s. The author, Paul McHugh, is the son of George and Delphine McHugh and he grew up in an oak hammock not far from South Dade High School. His father, George, was a general contractor, a member of the Homestead Power Squadron and a real estate assessor for Coral Gables Federal Savings and Loan. He was the brother of Julia McHugh Morton, a well-known authority on tropical fruits. Paul has written four books and many articles on the environment. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. — Jeff Blakley

Glades of Youth

By Paul McHugh

Simply to recall the sounds that bled out of our woods at night is to summon a tiny hint of South Florida’s botanical and biological grandeur. I don’t mean now. I mean the way it was back then, in the Fifties, as I grew up in a rural area dubbed the Redlands. This region is located roughly midway between Miami and Key Largo.

On our full moon eves during summer, frogs would ratchet with abandon, insects whirr and click, night birds call, breezes sigh. Our entire biome seethed with a mingled panoply of “critter” music that soared beyond the symphonic in its delectable, sensual complexity.

Sometimes, moved by a mysterious prompt, one segment of that native orchestra would fall utterly silent. Thus signaled, all other parts also quit, whereupon a heavy stillness unrolled across the landscape, like a vast and humid caul. This suspenseful silence often lasted through more than a few of my heartbeats. Finally, faintly, off in the distance, some big boss frog would emit a bass rurp! And the whole whirligig calliope of swamp noises erupted, flooding in once more through the glass slats of an open jalousie window. This revived geyser of sound poured in with such vigor and vibrancy, it felt as though it could float me right up off my bed…

My family dwelt in a live oak hammock, a sort of grove or islet of higher terrain mainly peopled by moss-draped hardwoods. It was surrounded by pine forests, themselves bracketed by a few long, marshy arms of swamp. To say that we were just three or four miles away from the town of Homestead might render the level of wildness I describe seem ludicrous now, perhaps unbelievable.

I would remind a skeptic that back then Homestead was a mere pioneer village of just a few thousand souls. The dominant inhabitants of the region were its animals of air and grove, of slough and bay. The drive up to Miami required a lengthy run on a narrow road that wove through thirty miles of critter-thronged brush.
Our swampland cornucopia poured forth an abundance of bird life, with its overall character tailored to each season. In autumn, I recall a chorus of whippoorwills echoing through our woods. And in winter, we enjoyed the coo of doves by day, and the sonorous hoots of great horned owls by night. In early spring, migratory northern songbirds awakened with the dawn, then serenaded us also into wakefulness. Summer brought dense clouds of dragonflies, whereupon nighthawks made their roaring dives down through the sky to snatch them in their beaks and gobble ‘em up.

A major boyhood pastime for me was “conquering” all major oaks in our woods by seeking to climb to their upper branches – a project to which I applied the grit of a mountaineer intent on knocking off a menu of Himalayan peaks. That led to one of my major entertainments. I found that if I made my ascents just after sunrise or just before sunset, I could perch on thin branches jutting above the forest canopy and watch vast flocks of birds flying into and out of the Everglades. The most spectacular moments came when they flew right at me. I could see them coming in a dark feathered sheet that undulated just above the treetops. A seam ripped open in the flock’s fabric as the birds whizzed past my head, slightly altering flight paths no more than they would for a bark-rooted orchid. They didn’t expect to see a human being way up there, and consequently did not treat me as though I might be one. Exhilarating!

Other remarkable swampland denizens visited us on the forest floor; some a bit more welcome than others. I recall my father shotgunning a rattlesnake out in front of the house when I was four, and when I was six, I went into the bathroom to find a water moccasin coiled around the base of our toilet. He dispatched that intruder with a fireplace poker. When I was ten, I and my brothers opened the front door, and a highly venomous coral snake dropped down from its top jamb. A swiftly delivered boot heel solved that particular problem.

Far more benign were our giant blacksnakes. These serpent gods seemed ultimately regal, yet amazingly gentle. They writhed through the woods with authority and grace. Whenever I spotted them, it seemed they were journeying – focused on a far distant goal. We kids would caper around these immense, indigo snakes in a sort of dazed awe. They never really bothered us, nor we them. Instead, they’d pause in their travels while briefly fixing us with an obsidian eye.

For me, that glossy black bead staring back at me was an aperture to an alien world, one in which I thought I saw a tiny glint of amusement.

If I attempt to tell modern biologists how giant these blacksnakes were, they scoff. Yet I do vividly recall one individual who stretched all the way across a two-lane road, with both ends of it disappearing into the brush.

No portrait of wildlife in South Florida back in the day can be complete without a paean to our bugs. To explain how abundantly and persistently and avidly we got bugged, here’s my top metaphor. If you saw a person strolling down a pathway in summer, he’d always resemble an exclamation point or question mark. The small dot was the person, and all the rest of the symbol would be a cloud of bugs above and around him. Most of our outings were accompanied by gnats, sandflies, ants, spiders, ticks, wasps, native bees, flies, chiggers, scorpions, a near-infinite supply of mosquitoes, and yet more fellow-travelers also eager to bite, but far too numerous to cite. Back then, I leaked trickles of blood and lymph as if my lumped hide were as holed as a colander, both from the bug nips, and my attempts to apply first aid to them with the sole tools I had available – my fingernails.

However, now, perhaps I should try to extrude some gratitude. Throughout my boyhood, I got bitten, stung, scratched, soiled and muddied so extravagantly by my environment that today I seem to enjoy a rather robust immune system. (I hear kids today, interacting mainly with their smartphones while doing diddly-squat in the outdoors, fail to enjoy a similar advantage – hence their soaring rate of allergies.)

But the most important legacy from halcyon years in Florida’s then-lush biome was my durable veneration of nature’s beauty and her potency. That force has inspired and guided and instructed me throughout life.

Due to it, I’ve long made war – in the strongest yet most peaceful manner I’ve been able to devise – on those who poison, raze, exploit and pollute or otherwise proceed to heedlessly trash our precious natural home. A few times I did that in direct action campaigns. However, mostly I did so by wielding a pen, reporting for decades on ecological and resource issues. So as to avoid being a total scold, I also sought to celebrate vigorous sport activity and adventuring in what was left of our natural realm.

Did I make a difference? Hell, who knows! Perhaps a small, yet a measurable one. No matter the result, I feel all right about honoring and remaining true to my early and most profound sentiments – acquired at an early age in that live oak hammock.

Meanwhile, humanity races madly onward to its evolutionary bottleneck. And we drag countless other species along with us toward a time of rigorous accounting, and of potential calamity. To me, that moment of terrible reckoning now seems too close for comfort.

I seldom return to my home hammock (which my dad, in one of his rare fits of grace, named Acrux, after a star in the Southern Cross). When I do, each visit provides me with a vision of what once was, and what could be again. It also offers a swift and sobering reminder of how many natural wonders have already been subtracted with such ruthlessness from our world.

The rich wildlife zone I felt privileged to live within, today’s young can scarcely imagine.

On a visit back to Acrux, on an October night in the mid-1990s, I stood outside our old house, considering that far too many years had passed since I’d managed to hear even a single whippoorwill’s song. And as I pondered that, amazingly, one did call. (Most likely I’d heard it first subliminally, which is why I’d even gone outside and had begun meditating upon the topic.)

The night bird’s ritual trill seemed almost the cry of a ghost. It came from so far away, it was so isolated. No other whippoorwill answered, as they did in times past. Me, I didn’t hesitate to respond. I set out upon a shadowy forest path I still knew from my youth, left the hammock behind, went through one of the last belts of scrub pines and palmettos, came out onto a roadway, crossed a canal bridge. I walked for more than a mile in the darkness as the call waxed louder and louder.

Finally, I homed in on the bird itself. But I drew so near that it grew wary and ceased to call. Didn’t care, I felt I had a good and worthy plan. I sat, leaned my back against a scrub pine’s rough and scabby trunk and simply waited. Minutes ticked by, can’t say how many. But, no worries. All the world’s time lay cupped right there, at rest in the palm of my hand.

And the whippoorwill began again to sing. Its cry was so pure, so clear, so lovely and so close that shivers rippled along my spine. I could take its song into my mind and soul with the avidity of a wanderer who after a string of sweltering days crosses a shaded oasis and is able to gulp from a miraculous well of cool water.

This last, lost call of a solo night bird afflicted me with great sadness. I mourned the whippoorwill’s loneliness. Oddly, though, its cry also gave me hope. For I saw right then, and I also think now, that our wild world is far more durable and resilient than any one set of its forms. If humanity should vanish into a jumbled heap of ash and mendacity and greed and bone fragments, our earth will collect herself, brood for a bit, and then emit many new lives in fresh shapes.

One day in the future, something like panther tracks may again be found in the rain-softened marl of a swampland path. Or of an evening, galaxies of fireflies may drift again under dense beards of something that resembles Spanish moss. And once more, whippoorwills call to one another across a shaded landscape.

When that happens, I hope highly aware younglings of some other species will also be present, to hear and see and deeply value all of it.

Copyright 2017 by Paul McHugh

This article may not be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the author. To contact him, use the Contact tab on the menu bar of this website.

Lyman B. Gould

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

Writing the post entitled The Beginnings of Goulds led me to want to find out more about Lyman B. Gould, for whom the community is named. I searched through issues of the Miami Metropolis from the era, conducted census research on Ancestry and searched records on the Internet and FindAGrave for this post.

As I wrote in my previous post, Lyman B. Gould was born in Brown Township, Washington County, Indiana. His grandfather, John Gould (1790-1858), was in Washington County as early as 1840 and one of John’s brothers, Lyman, owned a store in Claysville in Vernon Township in 1830. It is likely that Lyman was the first of the Gould family to move from Ontario County, New York, where John was born, to Indiana. John had married Anna Hilton and they had at least 7 children, including Riley, the father of Lyman B., who was born in about 1823. In the 1850 census, Riley Harrison Gould and his wife, Sarah Irene Wheelock, were the parents of four children: William K., born in about 1846; Cynthia A., born in about 1849; Lyman B. Gould, born in July of 1857 and Samuel Lincoln, born in about 1860. Lyman was named after his uncle, who died in 1837.

Riley Harrison Gould enlisted in Company C, 56th Regiment, Illinois Infantry as a private on September 28, 1861 and was discharged on January 28, 1862. He re-enlisted as a sergeant in Company A of the 66th Indiana Infantry on August 3, 1862 and was discharged on June 3, 1865. After the war ended, Riley and his brother Norton moved their families to the Cuming City area in Washington County, Nebraska, where he was a farmer.

On October 15, 1876, Riley’s son Lyman married Henrietta Williams at Fort Calhoun in Washington County, Nebraska. He was 21 and she was 17. The 1880 census of Blair, Nebraska lists Lyman Gould as 24. He was a brakeman on the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad and was living in a hotel, which may explain why his wife was not listed. Lyman next appears in the historical record in Pueblo County, Colorado, where he married Sarah Catherine Berry on November 17, 1889. I was unable to discover the fate of Henrietta Williams. It is unclear why Lyman moved to Pueblo but the town was served by railroads and had a booming steel industry.

At some point, Lyman and his second wife moved back to Indiana, where they were living in New Albany in the mid-1890s. The first mention of Lyman B. Gould in Miami appeared in the September 2, 1898 issue of the Miami Metropolis where it was noted that “Lyman B. Gould, of New Albany, Ind., has been in Miami for some days prospecting for a future home…” Voice of the boom town that it was, the newspaper crowed on September 23 that Lyman had “struck it rich by finding a homestead a little over six miles west of town consisting of 160 acres…” His property was “four miles west of the Everglades schoolhouse.” He apparently quickly sold that property for a tidy profit and moved closer to Miami as a deed from Mary Brickell and her husband to L. B. Gould for $280 was listed in the May 5, 1905 issue for “lot 1, block 4 section 38(sic), tp. 54, range 41 east.” Since there are only 36 sections in a township, this property was likely in section 28, which encompassed the settlement of Cocoanut Grove. Lyman had owed taxes on this parcel as early as May 31, 1901 so he had been living on the property prior to receiving the deed, which may have happened when he paid for the property in full.

Gould regularly appeared in the Miami Metropolis from March 9, 1900 on.

In the 1900 census, Lyman and his wife, S. Catherine, lived in Cocoanut Grove, where he was a watchman on the railroad. Many notable early settlers in South Dade lived in Cocoanut Grove in 1900, among them John S. Fredericks, the surveyor who platted the Town of Homestead in 1904.

In early August of 1901, Henry Harrison and Samuel H. Richmond petitioned the County Commission for a road to be built from Cutler to the southeast corner of 13-56-39 and then west to the southeast corner of 16-56-39. The committee appointed to lay out the road was composed of Charles Gossman, Thomas R. Pinder and Frank Caldwell. Gossman and Caldwell had filed homestead claims in 1898 and 1901 that would benefit from the new road.1

On August 26, 1901, Lyman B. Gould filed a claim2 for the S 1/2 of the S.E. and S.W. quarters of section 13-56-39. The boundaries of this claim are from S.W. 117 to S.W. 127 Avenues and from S.W. 228 Street down to S.W. 232 Street. The newly surveyed road, completed by Samuel H. Richmond and Thomas R. Pinder, conveniently ran right past his claim in section 13. On April 25, 1906, his claim was cancelled by the land department and the claim was picked up by Frank J. Sanford on July 9, 1906.3

Click on the title below the map to download the survey of the Perrine Grant, showing Samuel H. Richmond as Land Agent.

Perrine Grant

Courtesy of the University of Miami Richter Library

Lyman first appeared as a registered voter in the City of Miami in October, 1901. In October of 1902, he was a trustee on the incorporation papers of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Miami.

Lyman’s wife, Sarah Catherine, was the victim of an assault by a “negro” on January 23, 1903 while she was on her way home from her job as a tailoress for the firm of Kronowitter & Worley in Miami. In the ensuing days, Miami was caught up in a racial frenzy and when the alleged perpetrator was caught, his whereabouts were not advertised for fear of a lynching. The assailant, one Richard Dedwilley, was tried and convicted to hang on February 27, 1903. The prosecution and defense rested after “two or three hours” and the jury returned its verdict in less than 15 minutes, according to the account in the newspaper. He was hung in the county jail yard on March 13, 1903.

The construction of the F.E.C. Railway from Miami to Homestead started in January of 1903. Charles T. McCrimmon had a contract with the railroad for the timber on the right-of-way and it is likely that Gould worked for him cutting down the virgin pine trees for lumber and cross ties. According to Jean Taylor’s oral history, The Villages of South Dade, Gould was the foreman of a tie-cutting crew. There is no mention of Gould in the Miami Metropolis from late December, 1903 until July of 1905, when there was a note that L. B. Gould and his wife had granted the F.E.C. Railway a “right-of-way across [his] property for extension purposes for $1.00.” It is likely that during this time, Gould was busy supervising a crew of Bahamians along the route of the Cutler Extension, as it was called, who were cutting down pine trees for Charles T. McCrimmon’s sawmill.

On February 23, 1906, Sam C. Lawrence filed an “ejectment” lawsuit against Mary Brickell, W. B. Brickell and L. B. Gould. This was probably related to Gould’s property in Cocoanut Grove. On April 27, 1906, “Lyman G. (sic) Gould et ux” apparently sold lot 4, block 58 in the City of Miami to E. W. Stephens. He was getting ready to move, it seems, for the next mention of him is a note to the editor of the Miami Metropolis from him in Phoenix, Arizona on July 1, 1906.

He probably timbered his homestead claim and then got ready to move because his claim was cancelled by the “R. R.” on April 23, 1906 and picked up by Frank J. Sanford on July 9, 1906.

Having made his money in Dade County, like so many other early “homesteaders”, Gould moved to the bustling town of Phoenix, where he and his wife got into the real estate business. On April 22, 1909, he registered to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. From 1914 until 1916, the Phoenix City Directory shows them living at 312 N. 1st Avenue, where he was in real estate and his wife, S. Katherine, was a dressmaker, an occupation she had followed in Miami.

Lyman and his wife divorced while they were in Arizona and he came back to Dade County, where he died in on March 4, 1928. The informant on his death certificate was Charles Gould, most likely Lyman’s younger brother, born ca. 1869. His wife stayed behind in Phoenix, where she died on April 6, 1961.

Lyman B. Gould was only in Dade County for eight years and in the Goulds area for perhaps three. He must have been part of a very large lumbering operation to have the railroad go to the expense of building a siding south of Perrine which was known as late as 1909 as Gould’s Siding. Gould was a very typical early pioneer who came here to make his fortune by exploiting the abundant natural resources of this area and then decamped for greener pastures in Arizona. In a future post, following up on my previous post, I’ll tell the story of Bailes Road.

The Beginnings of Goulds

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

Jean Taylor, in her book Villages of South Dade, gives only the sketchiest of information about the community of Goulds, writing only that it was named for a “Mr. Gould”, who was from Indiana and was the foreman of a tie-cutting crew for the Florida East Coast Railway. I’m posting this essay to expand on her account a little bit.

Lyman B. Gould was born in July, 1857 in Brown Township, Washington County, Indiana. His parents were Riley and Sarah Gould, born ca. 1823 and 1827, respectively. In 1880, Lyman was a brakeman on a railroad in Washington County, Nebraska. By 1900, he was living in Cocoanut Grove with his wife, S. Catherine. Among his neighbors were John and Antoinette Frederick. John S. Frederick was a prominent civil engineer who was employed by the Florida East Coast Railway. His name appears on many legal documents in early Dade County history.

Lyman didn’t stay that long in Dade County – on April 22, 1909, he registered to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona and later got into real estate there. Russell F. Tatum, Homestead’s first mayor, also moved to Phoenix and continued his real estate career there. Tatum Boulevard in that city is named after him. Lyman returned to Dade County some time before 1928 and died here that year.

After Lyman left what later became known as the community of Goulds, development proceeded apace. I found the following article in the September 27, 1912 issue of the The Miami Weekly Metropolis and thought it would be of interest to those of you interested in the history of the area.

MARVELOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE GOULDS TOMATO DISTRICT

Town Achieves Reputation of Being Largest Shipper of Tomatoes South of Miami

TOMATO CATSUP FACTORY DOES A BIG BUSINESS

45,000 Gallons of Tomato Pulp Shipped Out First Year, Output Increased in Later Years — Large Acreages Will Be Planted to Tomatoes and Truck This Year

_____________________________

(From Tuesday’s Daily)

A season of marvelous development covering the brief span of the past three years has changed the town of Goulds, which lies some 23 miles south of Miami, from a flag station where trains rarely stopped, and the only hint of human habitation was a little store operated only during the winter months to the largest tomato shipping point south of Miami, commonly referred to as the “Gate way to the Redlands,” and the center of one of the most prosperous truck and fruit growing sections in all south Florida.

The town had its inception three years ago1 from the operation of a large tract of the big thousand-acre farm of Mr. J. C. Baile, with whom Mr. G. L. Miller2 was associated in the handling of the big crop. Each year has seen a large increase in settlers and in the acreage set to fruit and truck. In response to a growing demand for lots, the Miller-Baile subdivision of fifteen acres was lately placed on the market, and a large number of lots have already been sold. The property is owned by Mr. G. L. Miller, a member of the Walter Waldin Investment company, and Mr. J. C. Baile, a prominent business man and fruit grower of this section.

The visitor to Goulds is at once impressed with the fact that it must be a great truck growing section, for four well equipped packing houses are to be seen. One of them, Mr. A. L. Hearn’s, is now busy packing this year’s grapefruit, and while the car of fruit lately put on its way by an elaborate legal process is said to be experiencing further difficulties en route, still growers with ripening fruit in that section, are asking Mr. Hearn to pack their crops as soon as possible.

Big Tomato Catsup Factory

Besides the packing industry a tomato catsup factory takes care of the “over-ripes” and culls of the big tomato crop of that section, which otherwise would be a total loss, and yearly carload after carload of the finest catsup in the world is shipped away from this plant to the markets of the north, to become the main ingredient of the famous Heinz and Armour brands of catsup.

In the early fall of 1909, Mr. G. L. Miller who was interested with Mr. J. C. Baile in the cropping of several hundred acres of tomatoes on Mr. Baile’s thousand-acre farm at that point, went to Chicago and interested the Grant-Beall company, which came and established a factory to prepare tomato pulp, and the first year 45,000 gallons of the pulp was shipped out, or more than ten carloads. In 1910 the plan of preparing pulp was changed to making catsup, and the latter industry has proven profitable during the last two seasons.3

Among the new buildings lately completed is the new hotel, a butcher shop, a school house, upon ground donated by Mr. Miller, two residences, and the announcement is made that next week several houses will start in the new Miller-Baile subdivision. Mr. B. E. Hearn plans to open soon a much-needed lumber yard and hardware store, which will facilitate the building operations there to a considerable extent.

Acreage Will Be Increased

From all indications there will be a much larger acreage of truck planted this year at Goulds than ever before. Many new truckers have come in from the north and from other sections of Florida, and will take part in this season’s operations. Mr. T. V. Moore and Mr. Tom McClane will put out 25 acres, all to tomatoes. Mr. J. H. Bush will have his usual 125 acres. Mr. Bush lives at Goulds and is obtaining a reputation as one of the successful growers of that section. The big Baile farm will have 300 or 400 acres in tomatoes. Mr. Will Peters expects to plant about 100 acres. Mr. Tom Peters, commonly known as the “tomato king,” from his remarkable success with this crop, will have about 400 acres.

Mr. Preston Lee and Mr. W. Mobley intend planting about 10 to 15 acres each, while Messrs. D. H. Lyle, [hole in paper] Clifford 4 P. C. Crockett, H. Poppell, J. Griffith, H. A. Proctor, Caldwell, R. L. Sanford, W. H. Parker and S. P. Lewis will have in their usual acreage.

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There are a number of “seeds” of future articles embedded in this essay. T. V. Moore was an early settler in Miami and was known as the Pineapple King. His wife was involved in many civic activities and she helped found Royal Palm State Park. Preston Lee was a very important early agriculturalist and Simeon P. Lewis carried the U. S. Mail between Cutler and Black Point, before the Florida East Coast Railway was extended to Homestead in 1904. Not mentioned in the article is William H. Cauley, for whom Cauley Square is named.

Here is the plat of the town of Goulds that was mentioned in the article. Note the existence of Baile’s Road. Click on the title under the image to download a copy of the plat that you can enlarge to study further.

Miller Baile 1912

Plat of the Town of Goulds