Alexander Catell Graw

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

While reading an article in Tequesta by Jeanne Bellamy, I ran across the name A.C. Graw, which was familiar to me from viewing a photograph of what is thought to be his yacht, moored in the Florida City canal near what is now the intersection of Krome Avenue and East Palm Drive.

Courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

Bellamy had written that “The Homestead Enterprise was founded in 1912 by J.A. Kahl, a Methodist minister, who sold his interest in 1915 to A.C. Graw, former Philadelphia publisher.” She went on to write that Graw and his family were on their way to California aboard their yacht when their trip was aborted by the outbreak of WWI. According to Bellamy, Graw and his yacht entered the Florida City canal on February 16, 1915. Bellamy’s account of how Graw came to the Homestead area is incorrect but to tell the full story is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that Graw likely came here because of his friendships with men involved in the temperance movement, most notably, Joseph A. Kahl, the owner and publisher of the South Florida Banner.

So who was A.C. Graw? His full name was Alexander Catell Graw and he was born on November 14, 1860 in Haddonfield, Camden, New Jersey. His father, the Rev. Jacob Bentley Graw, born on October 24, 1832 to George and Louisa Graw, was a Methodist minister who was a prominent member of the temperance movement. In 1901, Alexander Graw wrote a biography of his father, Forty-Six Years in the Methodist Ministry: Life of J.B. Graw, D.D. 1832-1901. If you are interested in reading portions of the book, you can download it from this website by clicking on the Researchers tab in the menu.

As early as 1880, Alexander’s occupation was as a “printer.” A fierce opponent of alcohol, like his father, he published a prohibition newspaper in Camden, NJ for nearly 20 years. Alexander owned the printing firm Graw, Garrigues & Graw in Camden, New Jersey. In 1900, at the age of 40, he married his wife, Jennie, who bore him two children: George Lamonte (16 February 1901 – 26 July 1980) and Elizabeth I., born about 1904. Graw named his son after George M. La Monte, who ran for governor of New Jersey in 1889 on the Prohibition ticket. George L. Graw was very active in agricultural circles in Homestead.

At the time of the 1910 census, Alexander was a magazine publisher who lived in Haddonfield, Camden, New Jersey. According to the demographics that I looked at, Haddonfield is a very upscale community with a median household income in 2010 of $112,105. Median means half-way, so half of Haddonfield residents had a household income of more than $112,105 and half less. Haddonfield is located about 10 miles east of Philadelphia, on the other side of the Delaware River. No doubt, Alexander Graw commuted to his job in Philadelphia. Perhaps he kept his yacht moored in the Delaware River.

In the 1920 census, he appears in precinct 24 in Florida City. He apparently didn’t stay that long in Florida City, though. Jeanne Bellamy wrote that Graw “started the first newspaper in Hialeah at the instance of its developers, James H. Bright and Glenn Curtiss.” On June 14, 1923, The Homestead Enterprise reported that Mr. and Mrs. A.C. Graw, of Hialeah, had received visitors from Florida City. He still had local connections, though, because in that same issue there was an advertisement on page 10 naming him as one of the directors of the Citizens Bank of Homestead. By 1930, Graw and his wife were living in Dania, in Broward County. He was still a newspaper publisher, at least according to the census.

In the April 27, 1918 issue of the Miami Herald, it was reported that A.C. Graw was the editor of the Homestead Enterprise. That continued through at least October 20, 1920 but ended before 1923, when he handed off the responsibilities of the position to his son, George. In addition to what the censuses show, Alexander undertook any job that needed to be printed. He apparently purchased and installed printing equipment for newspapers, book publishers or any other business that required his services.

During the boom years in Homestead, a new newspaper, owned by Ben Archer, the Homestead Leader, started publication in the late summer of 1923. As the Great Depression deepened in the late 1920s and advertising revenue fell, Ben Archer purchased the Homestead Enterprise in late 1931 and the first issue of the Homestead Leader-Enterprise was published on November 6, 1931.

Alexander Graw died at the home of his daughter, Isabel E. Ford, in Jackson, Mississippi on January 19, 1931 and is buried in the family burial ground in Beverly, NJ.

The Florida East Coast Railway

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

In this post, I’m going to detour from my previous posts about pioneering families so that I can bring the role of the Florida East Coast Railway into the picture. Because history is not a popular subject to read about, the vast majority of people now living in Dade County have no idea how important the Florida East Coast Railway was to the development of this part of Florida.

When we have a visitor at the Museum, one of the displays that I direct their attention to is the one about the FEC.

FEC Display 1024x768

While they are looking at the display, I tell them that the building that houses the Florida Pioneer Museum in Florida City was the station agent’s house, built in 1904 by the Florida East Coast Railway and that it was moved from Homestead, where it was located on S. Flagler Ave., in the mid-1960s. If they are intrigued about the subject, we direct them to two books on the railroad, both available from Amazon and other booksellers: “Speedway to Sunshine: The Story of the Florida East Coast Railway, by Seth Bramson (revised edition, published in 2003) and Florida’s Great Ocean Railway: Building the Key West Extension, by Dan Gallagher, published in 2003. The first book is by Mr. FEC, Seth Bramson, and tells the tale of the FEC from the beginning. Mr. Gallagher’s book is a detailed and fascinating history of the construction of the Key West Extension.

Many visitors are under the mistaken impression, because they learn about the magnificent hotels that Flagler built in St. Augustine, Ormond Beach, West Palm Beach and Miami, that Flagler built his railway for tourism. That is not true: Flagler built his railroad as part of his program to develop the east coast of Florida. Henry Flagler, along with John D. Rockefeller and others, were the founders of Standard Oil and that is where Flagler’s fortune came from. If you’d like to read a very interesting history of Standard Oil, I’d recommend that of Ida Tarbell – she pulls no punches.

Flagler had already built his fortune by the time that his doctor recommended that he take his wife, who was seriously ill, to Florida which, with its warmer climate, might be helpful in her recovery. Unfortunately, that didn’t help and his wife died in 1881. But Flagler had seen Jacksonville and saw a new business venture to embark upon: that of a real estate developer. In short order, Flagler built the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine and bought three small railroads, improving them by converting them to standard gauge trackage. His railroad reached Daytona by the spring of 1889. Seeing the development to the north of them, landowners south of Daytona began to inquire of Flagler when he would extend his railroad further south. That began in 1892, when Flagler obtained a charter from the State of Florida which granted him permission to build his railroad all the way down to Miami. As far as I know, no one has written a definitive account of how Flagler built his railroad from Daytona down to Miami. However, there is an excellent article, Henry Flagler and the Model Land Company, published in Tequesta in 1996, by William E. Brown and Karen Hudson that goes into considerable detail about the land holdings of the Flagler System and how they came to be. I found it fascinating reading and would encourage readers of this post to read the article – it explains an awful lot that counters the romantic notion that Flagler built his railway for tourism.

In short, Flagler was the last of the late-19th century robber barons. He came to Florida to make money and for no other reason. His railway provided a means for settlers to reach their homesteads and to market their produce. The Key West Extension was built for trade with Cuba and Latin America, not for tourism or any other reason. By importing pineapples from Cuba, with unfavorable tariffs for local producers, the FEC drove pineapple farmers in Dade and Monroe counties out of business. Flagler and his lieutenants were hard-headed businessmen who wheeled and dealt for the most favorable terms for their ventures. That should be abundantly evident to anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Florida East Coast Railway. Unfortunately, it is a story that many do not know.

A very large number of the early settlers in South Dade County were involved in some way with the FEC, if only as their only means to get their produce to market. An objective account of the FEC’s cut-throat business practices has yet to be told. There are a number of hints about the subject in the accounts about early pioneers that I’ve read so far, but no one, to my knowledge, has put them together to shed some light on the subject.

John W. & Florence M. Hunt

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

John Wilbur Hunt was born on December 18, 1865 in Huntsville, Mississippi. His father was John Jackson Hunt and his mother was Mary Eliza Cook. In the 1880 U.S. Census, he was living with his father and mother in Burrton, Harvey County, Kansas. His father was 56 and his mother was 57.

On May 27, 1892, he married Florence M. Higbee in Logan County, Oklahoma Territory. Florence was born in December, 1873 in Kansas. John was 26 at the time and Florence was 18. They had 4 children: Harry H., born in 1893; Wilbur Wesley (20 Aug 1895 – 8 Dec 1965), Ruby L., (27 Jan 1893 – 11 Sept. 1927); and Maude V., born in 1905. All of the children were born in Edmond, Oklahoma, 100 miles southwest of Lawton, Oklahoma, where James M. Powers was from. Even though all of these people were from Oklahoma, I doubt that the Hunts knew the Powers in Oklahoma.

According to Jean Taylor in her book,The Villages of South Dade, John was a U.S. Marshal in Edmond, Oklahoma. Taylor says that he owned a bakery and a restaurant there and that his son, Wilbur, was the baker. The 1900 U.S. census says that he was a blacksmith and the 1910 census says that he was the proprietor of a restaurant. Taylor writes that Hunt sold his businesses and decided to move to Florida, apparently shortly after 1910, because Taylor asserts that Hunt “stayed in Miami awhile having a good time, and then purchased two lots in Detroit right in back of Edward Stiling’s home. He sent for his wife, Florence, his two sons, Wilbur and Harry, and his two daughters, Ruby and Maude, who arrived in Detroit in January, 1913.” An article in the Miami Herald, dated March 30, 1913, stated that the Hunts had moved into the Watson house and that “Mr. Hunt and sons are now clearing their two lots, providing for their new home.”

Jean Taylor wrote that John was a hard-working man, well-respected in the community, and was elected as an alderman for the new Florida City Town Council in 1914. He was also a Town Marshal in 1917 and commuted to Key West where he worked as a carpenter in the summer of 1917. Taylor wrote that because of her husband’s heavy drinking, Florence left him in 1917 and he ended up living in “a shack out in the Everglades.” I don’t know who supplied Mrs. Taylor with this information, but it seems to be a bit harsh. His sister, Mrs. A. G. Collins, who lived in Tampa, visited him in 1918 and he had Reese Self arrested on a warrant charging him with enticing his 14-year-old daughter Maude from her home in 1919. Perhaps his marriage was rocky and perhaps that is why his wife moved her hospital to Homestead but he did not live in “a shack out in the Everglades” before 1920. A realty transfer that appeared in the July 24, 1920 issue of the Miami Herald shows that M. J. Porter sold lot 6, block 39 in Florida City to J. W. Hunt. This lot was four blocks south of Palm Ave. (Palm Drive, now) and one block west of the railroad. Perhaps he sold it soon after buying it because a note in The Miami Herald on July 21, 1919 stated that A.D. Clinton was “hauling lumber for J. W. Hunt seven miles down the canal to build a camp where Mr. Hunt is intending to put in a crop.” His obituary states that he had engaged in “small truck farming on a three-acre plot in the Florida City east glade” for the last nine years. He died at his home so even if he had a problem with alcohol (he was not the only one who did, by a long shot), he had friends who checked up on him regularly.

John W. Hunt died on July 29, 1929, at the age of 63, and was buried in Section C, Lot 41, grave 1SE at Palms Memorial in Naranja on August 2. There is no marker on the grave.

Florence was an experienced nurse, as there is a reference to her being “on a case at Homestead” in the April 12, 1914 issue of the Miami Herald. Earlier, in the January 2, 1914 issue of The South Florida Banner, she was reported to have “returned to Detroit from Homestead where she had a nursing case.” Florence went on to open the Florida City Hospital, whose patients were primarily pregnant women, in a house located on the west side of Broadway (now 5th Avenue) at S.W. 1st St., across from the Methodist Community Church.

In the June 28, 1919 issue of The Miami Herald, on page 10, there is this note: “Jane D. Tower and John B. Tower to Florence M. Hunt, lot 30, Jane D. Tower addition, Homestead, $175. 50¢ revenue stamp.” On August 11, 1919, Florence was granted a building permit by the Town of Homestead to build a 26′ x 36′ building on lots 29-30 in Tower’s addition.On these lots, Florence contracted with Mr. Moon to build the Florence Hunt Hospital, on the south side of N.W. 4th St. (Palmetto at the time) in the middle of the block. In another article in the Miami Herald, dated August 1, 1919, “[c]ontracts are being let for the erection of a new building in Homestead into which Mrs. J.W. Hunt plans to remove the Florida City hospital. By being in Homestead, the hospital will be more centrally located and more convenient to patients.” The building was quickly finished and the hospital moved from Florida City to Homestead on Saturday, September 6, 1919. The “loss of the hospital,” according to the article in the Miami Herald, dated September 11, 1919, “is a misfortune to Florida City, not easily repaired.”

She also apparently owned lot 25 in the same subdivision, because in 1927, Florence’s address was 110 N.W. 4th St., which is at the intersection of N.W. 1st Avenue and 4th St. and not in the middle of the block, where the hospital was located. The Jane D. Tower subdivision is in the Dade County records, plat book 3, page 114 and was recorded on January 7, 1914. Florence operated her Florence Hunt Hospital until she suffered a stroke in 1936 and had to close it. Florence Mahallia Hunt died on 4 September 1940 at the age of 66. She was buried in Section B, Lot 80, grave 1N in the Palms Woodlawn Cemetery in Naranja, next to her daughter and son-in-law, Maud V. and Wilbert Leppanen.

What I find so interesting about these people’s lives is how they moved around so much but yet managed to achieve some measure of success. John was born in Mississippi, lived in Kansas, where he may have met Florence, moved to Oklahoma, where he married and then moved to Florida, becoming a respected community member and an elected official before his life unraveled due to alcoholism. In my research, I learned that alcoholism was not at all uncommon then or now. Florence was born in Kansas, moved to Oklahoma, had four children, moved to Florida, separated from her husband, and went on to become a successful nurse who operated her own hospital.

James M. Powers

Historic South Dade Posted on by

By Jeff Blakley

James M. Powers is a name that appears often in the documentary records of the history of this area, along with Fred J. Powers. It will take another post to delve into who Fred Powers was, but he was not related to James M. Powers. There have been accounts written about the Miami Land & Development Company which claim that some of the officers of the company were from Oklahoma, so I decided to find out if that was true or not.

After doing some research on the Tatum brothers (Bethel B., Smiley M., Johnson R. and Judson H.), I discovered that they were from Bartow, Georgia. Strike them from the list – they were the owners of the Miami Land & Development Company. What about the officers? Well, on the plat of the lands that the Miami Land & Development Company owned in South Dade, James M. Powers was listed as the Secretary. I did some research on James M. Powers and bingo! – hit the jackpot. In 1910, James M. Powers, with his second wife, Sarah Lillian Runnells, were living in Ward 2 of Lawton, Comanche, Oklahoma. James Monroe Powers was, according to another public tree published on Ancestry.com, born on November 1, 1856 in Streator, LaSalle, Illinois. The tree says that he died on 1 February 1926 in Miami, but his gravestone in Henry, Illinois says 1925. By his first wife, Mary Cannon, he had three children: Edna, born in February, 1872; Ralph James, born in December, 1883; and Fred, born in December, 1886. By his second wife, Sarah Lillian Runnells, he had one daughter, Velma Ruth, born in 1907. She died in 1993.

In the 1900 census, James was living in Henry, Marshall, Illinois and was in the general merchandise business. He was widowed by this time and his daughter, Edna and sons, Ralph J. and Fred were living with him. The 1900 census says that James was born in November, 1855 in Illinois. On January 28, 1901, Powers suffered a major loss when a fire destroyed an entire city block, including the department store that he owned. The Henry News-Republican carried the story in its January 31 issue.

James M. Powers’ occupation, as listed in the 1910 census of Lawton, Oklahoma, was “real estate – general agent.” Lawton is located in southwestern Oklahoma. It was founded on August 6, 1901 and was named after Major Gen. Henry Ware Lawton. James and Lillian were the parents of one daughter, Velma Ruth. She was born on December 3, 1907 in Lawton, Comanche, Oklahoma, so James had left Marshall County, Illinois prior to 1907. I’d venture to guess that rather than rebuilding his business in Henry, he elected to move to a new place to start over.

James Powers was in Oklahoma to sell real estate and for no other reason. How he came to hook up with the Tatum brothers is a mystery. My guess is that James, being a real estate salesman, read about the land boom in Miami and came here to seek his fortune. He most likely became a Tatum Brothers Company employee after he arrived here.

On July 24, 1914, The Miami Herald reported that the Detroit Ice & Power Company had been organized in Detroit. The officers were Mr. Symmes, president; Mr. Tracy, vice-president and James M. and R. J. Powers, directors. R.J. was, no doubt, James’ son, Ralph J.

In 1917, James and Lillian were living on 11th St. west of Avenue T in Miami. He was the secretary-treasurer of the Miami Land & Development Company and his son, Fred W., was a salesman for the Tatum Brothers Company. He lived at the corner of Avenue T and 11th St. in Riverside Heights, which may have been the same house that his parents lived in. Fred’s brother, Ralph, is not shown.

In 1920, James was enumerated in Ward 8 of Atlanta, Georgia. His occupation was listed as “President – Publisher Manufacturer” and his wife was listed as a teacher. Their daughter, Velma, lived with them.

In 1922, he was back in Miami, along with his son, Ralph J. James and Lillian lived at 1658 S.W. 3rd St. and Ralph was in real estate on the Elser Pier. The Elser’s Pier was on the water at the foot of Flagler St. Fred is not listed.

In the 1923 City Directory, James M. Powers was listed as a salesman for the Everglades Land and Development Company, which is mentioned in this essay, which appeared in Tequesta in 1948. Evidently, there was a substantial turnover of employees at the Tatum Brothers Company, since the Secretary-Treasurer position only lasted for a few years for James Powers.

In the 1924 Miami City Directory, Jas M and Lillian R Powers were living at 1658 S.W. 3rd St. in Miami. He was still selling real estate. His daughter, Velma Ruth, a student (she was born in 1907 and was 17), was living with them. His son, Ralph J., was a principal in the firm of Powers & Young, “Dealers of Real Estate of the Higher Class – We Offer Guaranteed Investments.” They were located in suites 408-410 of the Calumet Building. Ralph and his wife lived at 344 N.E. 29th St. Ralph’s brother, Fred B., had died in 1920, as his widow, Blanche M., is shown as living in the rear of 327 N.E. 24th St., a short distance from her brother-in-law, Ralph.

James Monroe Powers died on 1 February 1925, at the age of 70. He is buried in the Henry Cemetery, in Henry, Illinois, along with his sons, Ralph and Fred.