The Palms Cemetery – Part II

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

From Homestead to Naranja

In Part I of this article, I presented the events leading up to the reservation of a plot of land for a graveyard in Homestead and showed its location. In this continuation of the series, I will show that the Model Land Co. and Dr. Tower, along with a lot of other men, were instrumental, for their own reasons, in the establishment of the South Dade Cemetery.

When John S. Frederick laid out Homestead in 1904, the Model Land Company had no way of knowing how rapidly the area would grow. In April of 1910, census enumerators counted 956 people in Homestead, Princeton, Redland and Silver Palm. Naranja and Goulds had no separate census district so it is unclear if those people were counted as part of Homestead and Princeton or if they were not enumerated. Even though a lot of people who died in the Homestead area were buried in the Miami City Cemetery or were shipped back to the town the deceased had come from, it was becoming obvious that a cemetery was needed.

On October 11, 1911, Leonard S. Mowry, in response to Ingraham’s letter dated May 12, wrote to Fred Morse that “a committee of 5” had selected “block 14 in section 33-56-39,” for a graveyard, though the letter does not state that the land was going to be used for that purpose. The signatories were only 4: L. S. Mowery, G. W. Brown, C. W. Hill and J. M. Bauer. Mowry requested that the deed be issued to those four men.

Screen Shot 2018 10 23 at 10 28 08 AMThe SW 1/4 of the NE 1/4, northeast of the second ‘3’

Model Land Co Lot

Lot numbers in the SW 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of 33-56-39

On October 16, Ernest M. Horton, who had claimed the 160 acres south of lot 14 (the SE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of 33-56-39) on September 4, 1908, wrote to Morse on the stationery of the Riverside Grocery Company, located at 503-505-509 Riverside Avenue in Miami, objecting to Mowry’s selection. He stated that “the location of the cemetery on this lot would do me great injury, besides not being as well adapted as the ten acres lot 13, joining this on the west.” Horton’s homestead was bounded on the north by S.W. 272 St., on the east by S.W. 147 Ave., on the south by S.W. 280 St. and on the west by S.W. 152 Ave.

Mowry apparently did not agree with Horton, as he circulated a petition asking the Model Land Co. to set aside lot 14 for a cemetery. It was signed by 52 people from all over the Redland District. In that document, the reason given for the change in location from Homestead was “that the land now used for that purpose being, that the ground at the present location is so low that it is not at all a fit place to bury a body, and the water percolating through the cemetery contaminates the water supply of the whole Town of Homestead to the great detriment of the general health. In the new location selected these objections are overcome as the ground is very high and consequently dry.”

The stated reasons in the petition mirrored the concerns of Morse and Ingraham but it is likely that the real reason for locating the cemetery far away from Homestead had more to do with real estate speculation and land values, not a concern over the health of the residents. There are indeed health hazards associated with cemeteries but those hazards were not well-understood in 1910. Negative public opinion was no doubt amplified by the authoritative voice of medical doctors, including Dr. Tower. There were other doctors living in the Homestead area, among them Dr. John Dennis in Modello, Dr. Edward L. Brooks in Homestead and Drs. Benjamin F. Forrest, Thomas W. Shields and Stuart S. Shields in Detroit. The contributions of these other doctors to the debate are unknown but there were only a few bodies buried in the graveyard and no one lived nearby as the subdivisions surrounding the burial ground had not yet been platted.

Dr. John B. Tower purchased 15 acres of land “near the station” in November of 1911,1 nine months after the body of Mrs. Charles R. Williams had been interred in the nearby cemetery.2 The ten acres immediately south of the cemetery, which became the Jane D. Tower Addition to Homestead, was platted in late 1913. How many other bodies were interred in the cemetery is unknown, but might be discovered by conducting a survey using ground penetration radar.

In a letter to Ingraham dated November 22, 1911, Morse alluded to what we now call the Not In My Back Yard syndrome by writing, “I presume there will be objections by neighbors, but that we should hear from later.” He did indeed hear from a neighbor, one Ernest M. Horton. But the real estate speculators in Homestead were happy and the Model Land Company knew that it could deal with one protestor much more easily than 52, many of whom were prominent citizens who were in a position to make life difficult for the F.E.C. It was a win-win situation for the Model Land Company.

Homestead Subdivisions

Map of Homestead Subdivisions Near the Former Graveyard

Note that Dr. Tower and his wife, Jane D., owned two city blocks (10 acres) very close to the cemetery and Ruben L. Moser, an early pioneer in Longview and a neighbor of Dr. Tower in Topeka, Kansas and in Longview, also owned two city blocks (10 acres). In 1913, Dr. Tower and his wife lived on what was platted as The Towers Addition (5 acres) in 1925.

A perusal of the names on the petition submitted to the Model Land Company show the names, in addition to Dr. Tower, of Charles Hammond, owner of a meat market; William A. King, the F.E.C. section foreman in Homestead; John U. Free, who left his fingerprint on everything in the area; J. D. Redd, the Homestead councilman and future County Commissioner; David W. Sullivan, owner of the Southern Pines Hotel; Joseph Cormack, merchant and Methodist minister; Edward Walbridge, the attorney who platted the Walbridge Addition, Thomas Evans, owner of the Redland Hotel; Edward Brooker, future town marshal; Henry Brooker, Sr., future lumber yard owner; Oscar Strickland, future Justice of the Peace; Leonard Mowry and Patrick Lamb, a future elector for the Town of Homestead. All of these men were prominent individuals and had plenty of money and power. This is the explanation for the change in the location of the cemetery, not a fear of disease. The public furor created over the threat the cemetery presented to drinking water supplies was a minor and convenient excuse to provide cover for real estate speculators.

In the final part of this series, I will provide the details surrounding the establishment of the Palms Cemetery in Naranja.

Click here to continue reading Part III
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The Palms Cemetery – Part I

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

From Miami to Homestead

The founding of the Palms Cemetery, known by various names over the years and now called Caballero Rivero Palms Woodlawn, has never been fully told. A lot of misunderstanding and conjecture has surrounded the origins of the cemetery. Ann Josberger McFadden, who compiled an index to the cemetery in 2001, included a short introduction that provided me with the clue necessary to tell the full story. She stated that “Frederick S. Morse wrote on May 8, 1912 that the association should incorporate1 before a deed was made.” However, McFadden provided no source for this quote or the following sentence in which she stated that “the burials made in Homestead should be removed and re-interred in the new location.” 2

Knowing that Frederick S. Morse was the agent for the F.E.C. Railway’s Model Land Co., which managed the railroad’s land holdings, I suspected that I needed to read some of the Model Land Company papers held at the J. I. Kislak Archive at the University of Miami. Unless otherwise stated in the text or in a footnote, all of the research for this essay is based on the letters in that collection at the archive.3
The territory south and west of the Perrine Grant in Dade County was opened for homesteading in 1896.

Perrine Grant Survey

Courtesy of the J. I. Kislak Archive

Many of the first pioneers who settled in the new area did not follow the rules laid down by the U. S. Government and were caught by government agents and had their claims cancelled. Others could not comply with the requirements and had to relinquish their claims. Those who stayed in the early period, from 1897 to 1904, were few, as Dan Roberts noted in his account. Those who died during that time, before the arrival of the railroad in August of 1904, were likely buried on their homesteads and their graves marked with stones or wooden markers. Those burials have been lost – there are no recorded historic gravesites in South Dade County. The wife of Charles R. Williams, who claimed a homestead in 1-57-38 in 1908, died on January 22, 1911 and was buried in “the new cemetery” in Homestead.4 There is no record of her re-burial at Naranja and this is the only documented burial at the original cemetery in Homestead. The only documented burial that was subsequently moved to the new Palms Cemetery was that of Frank E. Bauer, who was originally buried on October 10, 1905 on his homestead and re-interred in the new cemetery in section D, plot 7W, grave 1SW.5

The F.E.C.’s Cutler Extension, later known as the Homestead Extension, started on the south bank of the Miami River on January 30, 19036 and reached Homestead on July 30, 1904.7

John S. Frederick, the F.E.C. civil engineer in charge of determining the route to Homestead, had started his surveying work on July 2, 19028 and platted what became the Town of Homestead in June of 1904, ahead of the construction crews.

Homestead 1904

Map of Homestead as platted in 1904

Homestead

Each of the squares on this map covers 40 acres. The solid vertical line to the right of the letter ‘d’ in “Homestead” is Krome Avenue. The solid black rectangle is what would become the Town of Homestead in 1913 and is shown in Frederick’s plat above. The diagonally lined squares indicate land that belonged to the Model Land Co. in December of 1903.9 The two squares to the left that would become the Town of Homestead are the east 1/2 of the northeast 1/4 of section 13, township 57 south, range 39 east, the legal description of that land. The square below the ‘d’ in “Homestead” runs from Campbell Drive down to Mowry. Each square contains 160 acres and was divided into 16 ten-acre parcels by the Model Land Company (MLC). Despite what the map shows, the MLC only owned the east half – the west half was part of Leonard S. Mowry’s homestead claim, dated December 28, 1908. That east half runs from Mowry up to Campbell Drive and from Krome Avenue west to N.W. 2nd Ave. The square under the letter ‘d’, which runs from Campbell up to King’s Highway, was claimed as a homestead by Thomas A. Campbell on June 21, 1906.

Model Land Co Lot

This drawing shows the lot numbers for each square. The MLC owned lots 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 and 16 and the remainder in both squares was part of Mowry’s homestead claim. Each lot was subdivided into two city blocks. Campbell Drive is at the top, Mowry is at the bottom and Krome Avenue is on the right side.

In a letter to Frederick S. Morse, dated May 12, 1911, J. E. Ingraham, vice-president of the F.E.C., noted “that you are reserving this N 1/2 of lot 7 for a grave-yard, in Section 13-57-38…” This is the earliest reference to a grave-yard in what would become the Town of Homestead. Ingraham further wrote in that letter that Morse feared “on account of it being located so near to the Railroad Reservation in Section 15 (sic)-57-39 (sic) and near to the town of Homestead, that it would not be well to have a grave-yard so close to the Companys (sic) location for “Well” and water supply for the Extention (sic). I hardly think that it would be judicious to locate a grave-yard in this locality, and if there is any land that we could donate for this purpose where it would not be apt to contaminate the drinking water of the people living at Homestead or the Railroad employees, I think that it would be well to arrange another location.”

There never was an organized Homestead Cemetery with a Board of Directors, by-laws, and lots that were sold to individuals. The number of bodies buried on the property reserved by the Model Land Co. for a graveyard in Homestead is unknown, but the figure was not large. Ed McMichael, whose grandfather was J. R. Dorsey, stated that as a child, he accompanied his mother to the Palms Cemetery to place flowers and tend to the family graves and was told that the bodies exhumed from Homestead were buried in a mass grave on the north side of the cemetery. They could also be buried in Section A – McFadden’s index shows 2 unknown adults and 7 unknown infants buried in that location. It is unlikely that any proof of those burials will ever surface, though.

The folklore surrounding the existence of a Homestead Cemetery centers on Dr. John B. Tower and his “heroic” campaign to alert the citizenry to the dangers of drinking water contamination from leaking cadaver fluids. In part II of this article, I will explore that folklore and show why it is in error.

Click here to continue reading part II
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The 1903 F.E.C. Railway Map

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

While conducting research in the Model Land Company’s papers at the University of Miami’s J. I. Kislak Archive, I found a very important map of the land holdings of the F.E.C. Railway, the Model Land Co. and the Perrine Land Grant Co., dated December, 1903. The Kislak Archive scanned it for me for a very reasonable price and I am now sharing it with the public. It shows the route of what was then called the Cutler Extension down to Homestead, continuing a short distance past Homestead in a straight southwesterly direction. William J. Krome, who started his survey to Cape Sable in December of 1902, did not complete his work until June of 1903. He concluded that it was not economically feasible to build the railroad down to Cape Sable and then over Florida Bay to Key West. At the time this map was drawn, Flagler still planned to go to Cape Sable.

The map shows all of the area south of Miami, including Cutler, Larkin and Perrine. It names some of the finger glades and shows the route of the rough trail that ran from Miami down to Cutler and the Longview Trail/Homestead Road that ran from Cutler to Camp Longview. Note how the “road” runs from southwest of Homestead to Perrine and then straight east into Cutler, where the early pioneers in this area purchased their supplies from either the Brown & Moody or Tweedell Bros. stores. A close examination of the route shows that it ran through most of the earliest homestead claims in what was then known as the Homestead Country. Camp Longview, the termination of the Longview Trail, was located a short distance southwest of the intersection of Loveland Road (S.W. 217 Ave.) and Palm Drive (S.W. 344 St.)

F E C 1903 Map

1903 F.E.C. Railway Co. Land Map

This is a large file, so be patient while it downloads.

David Torcise, who created the Google Earth Map of Homesteads shows the land holdings of the Key West, Jacksonville & Tampa Railway on his map. Those land holdings correspond to the land shown as belonging to the F.E. C. Railway on the 1903 map. The Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railway went bankrupt in 1893 and its holdings south of Titusville were sold to Flagler in 1899. At the time David created his overlay, he did not have any information about the holdings of the F.E.C. in Dade County.

Daniel M. Roberts – Early Pioneer Tales

Historic South Dade Posted on by

by Jeff Blakley

I transcribed this article from the October 17, 1918 issue of The Homestead Enterprise and added links and footnotes to explain some of the events mentioned in the article.

Dan Roberts married Annie Margaret Fitzpatrick, the daughter of Byrd and Alice L. Fitzpatrick on September 22, 1906. She was the sister-in-law of Annie Mayhew Fitzpatrick, the well-known musician and writer of poetry and non-fiction. Dan was born on January 2, 1876 in Lake City, FL and filed for his homestead on Coconut Palm Drive and S.W. 182 Avenue on April 27, 1900. He was a prominent nurseryman and well-respected horticulturalist who established the Mason & Roberts Nursery as early as 1907 with his brother-in-law, Benjamin Mason.1 Early in 1911, the name was changed to The Homestead Nurseries Co., which was apparently later purchased by William H. Cauley and renamed the Dade County Nurseries Co., Inc. Roberts later established his own nursery, the Roberts Nurseries, and ran that business until at least mid-1925. Dan was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Homestead in 1912 and served in that capacity until at least 1926. Roberts Road, S.W. 182 Avenue, is named for him.

TALES OF PIONEER DAYS IN SOUTH DADE’S EARLY HISTORY

Dan M. Roberts Tells of An Alligator Hunt that Came Near to Having

A Very Serious Ending

By Dan M. Roberts

In the spring of 1898 I left Volusia county from a point on Lake George in company with a fellow by the name of Claude Jenkins. We had heard of the Homestead country as a land famous for good hunting and it was said that the soil was red similar to that of Cuba.2 We were both very fond of hunting and camping in the woods so the idea struck us so hard that we both decided to quituate (sic) from school and do some exploring. Our plans were to take a boat with a separable sail and follow the St. Johns River from Lake George across the Blue Cypress and Allapattah Flats west of Ft. Pierce and enter the Everglades at the north end, pass through Lake Okeechobee and finally land up on the Indian canoe trails along about Miami or Cutler. It was also in our plans to look the Homestead country over and then go to Cuba as we were tired of trying to raise groves and nurseries in Volusia on account of the freezes.

However, our plans could not be carried out for as we reached Lake Winder after following the curves of the St. Johns river for a couple of hundred miles to a point about west of Rock Ledge or a little southwest of Cocoa, the river suddenly ended in a vast bonnet bed as far in every direction as you could see. The weather was extremely dry and stayed so for five months after we reached this point. There was not enough water in the bonnet bed to float a match and the large roots ran along the surface like palmetto roots, making it impossible to pull a boat through it as a man could get no toe-hold except on the bonnet reeds and when his feet slipped he would go out of sight in the mud.

We decided to wait for rain but in the meantime we had to make a living so we fell to killing ‘gators for their skins and after five months stay we had killed six hundred of these reptiles 3 and sold their peelings to buyers at Cocoa. The skins brought us on average about 75 cents apiece. We had some terrible fights with some of the larger specimens. Most of the hunting was done at night along the river with a bullseye lantern which we took by turns and were on our heads to find the gators by shining it in their eyes and shooting them with a rifle. One night my partner made a poor shot on a monster and then broke the rule by not chopping him on the head with an axe when he dragged him into the boat. He said it was no use to chop him as it was only a little ways to the camp and we were homeward bound then, but only after a moment the gator was scratching on the bottom of the boat and I asked my partner to shine the light back; that this gator is coming to life. The partner turned the bullseye around on the gator and as soon as he did the gator got on his feet, turned around and made for him with all his might, with his mouth open wide enough to have swallowed him whole. The partner could not shoot for fear of either killing me or shooting a hole in the bottom of the boat. There was little time to think of anything so he backed off over the bow of the boat in 20 feet of water and the big gator went right in after him. The partner soon came to the top, lantern out and the gun gone to the bottom. The old gator was cutting up jack snorting and swallowing the water with his tail near the boat and between spells of laughter (from me, not from the partner) I finally paddled the boat to the shore, which was only a few feet away. Next day we went back and had a diving match for the gun and recovered it after about an hour.

After five months of this kind of work we decided that we had had enough of the gator business and sold our boat to a hunter on Lake Poinsetta, west of Cocoa. We then took the steam boat on Indian River and came down to West Palm Beach, reaching there sometime in the fall. Palm Beach was then in Dade county. My partner got a job at a milk dairy near Palm Beach and I planted a farm on shares with a land owner near Palm Beach. The farm froze out so it looked as if Jack Frost was after me. My partner, like myself, was ready to move again, so we planned another exploring trip. This time we would take a small boat with a separable sail and go down the Lake Worth canals to Biscayne Bay, stop at Cutler and look over the Homestead country and if things did not suit us we would go to Cuba. After exploring in the Homestead country for a couple of years and killing many deer we both decided to enter claims adjoining. So, the partner entered the claim that W. H. Cast lives on now and I am still living on mine.

When the Homestead exploration was planned there were two others joined us at Palm Beach. These were P. L. Jenkins 4 and Jim Prevatt. When we started out from Cutler we were told to put on our worst shoes as the rocks would ruin good shoes. We didn’t know any better than to do this, with the result that when we reached our first night’s camping place about 12 or 15 miles out we were all practically barefooted. We made our first night’s camp out in front of John Brinsell’s house and he told us a lot of things about this kind of rock being a gold-bearing rock and signs of pirates having their headquarters here in years past. Our young friend Prevatt lay with his head on a palmetto root and listened to Mr. Brinsell’s yarns about the rock. Among other things Mr. Brinsell said rock if pulverized would make good fertilizer and to this Prevatt said he knew a way better than that, which was to put the rocks in a pot and boil them until they were soft and then pour them along the rows for fertilizer. The next morning Prevatt deserted us and I have never seen him since, but in the next two or three days we went back to Cutler and found a note from him saying that we could have his interest in the boats and other things there; that he had gone back to Palm Beach.

At this time Brinsell 5 was the only man living on his claim. This was the same claim bought by L. R. Nixon and is located immediately south of the Baptist church at Silver Palm. Mr. Brinsell’s business was to locate newcomers on claims and he charged $10 for this. There had been a great number of claims entered before I came down here but none of them, except Mr. Brinsell, lived on them. 6 Finally, Charley Gossman, Will Anderson, C. W. Hill and possibly a few others came out and took up permanent residence on their claims.

Not many years after this there was a great rush of people entering claims on the mistaken idea of proving up by visiting the claim once in six months. Numbers of people from Miami had entered claims, all hands and the cook, while a large part of them had never seen the land and never expected to except to guess when he was on it and camp one night out of each six months. About this time the government sent down a very shrewd man by the name of Stanford for the purpose of making a tour of the country to ascertain who was complying with the law and who was not. This man never approached the defendant in the case but went to talk to everybody else to ask questions about him, so that there was no way of getting around him. When he left this country, he carried away the hopes of many would-be homesteaders. A few parties were fined for their manner of proving up, others had to buy their land with script, while the majority abandoned their claims without any effort to prove up. During this rush I made considerable money building log cabins for the would-be homesteaders. I probably built a hundred, scattered all over this country, all of which have been destroyed by woods fires years back.

About the time of the government clean-up, those who were left began to make some improvements on their places and I got practically all this work. I cleared and planted on acre in grove for Chap Brown 7 on the place where Mr. Capello 8 lives at present. I also cleared and planted at the same time a two-acre grove for Isaac Brown 9 on the place where Mr. Miller 10 lives now. These were the first groves planted in the country. There were scattered trees all over the country about the shacks but the first grapefruit tree to bear fruit was in the Chap Brown grove. The little tree bore 18 fruit with a silvery white skin and many home-seekers would pass along and look at it.

Frank Brown, 11 who is now postmaster of Miami, helped me do considerable of this work. We made a two-acre clearing for Henry Gossman 12 where his oldest grove now stands. Frank and I camped in a little shack just south of the work on the Charley Gossman claim, where we found a Dutch oven to cook in. We stayed there for a week or two determined to finish up our work before leaving. Our grub gave out entirely just as we finished the work and we painted a sign with smut from the oven, naming our place, “Camp Starvation.”

As time went on people moved in rapidly and it finally got to where there were real strangers living here, which was something new to my mind and had to be reckoned with; the idea that there could be a stranger in the Homestead country. About the time the railroad started from Miami people poured in from all directions, until I finally got used to seeing strangers.

As the population increased the business increased with it and I have been increasing the size of my nursery business from time to time, beginning with a ten-dollar nursery until my nursery sales for the year 1913 alone amounted to $35,000.13

Almost all the old timers are still living around here and it is noteworthy that they all have the greatest confidence and trust in each other.
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