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Grossman Hammock — 8 Comments

  1. This was an interesting article on Grossman Hammock. My father was Mark Grossman. Glad to see that it is still being available.
    Helen Grossman Myers

    • After I wrote the article, I found out that Grossman Hammock is no longer open to the public. The Park apparently cannot justify stationing a ranger there.

  2. The park is now open during daylight hours although the jewel of it (the hammock) is not currently open to the public. Thanks for the interesting article. -A.

  3. In 1969, my then husband Wes Howl, a native Perrine-eum, took me to Grossman Hammock in our old humpback Volvo. We drove out to what I thought was really the boonies! We got to the Hammock and it was like a prehistoric setting. You expected a a flying terradactyl to come out of the trees. As soon as we got out of our car (we were the only ones there) everything went quiet. But we just waited and soon all the sounds started up again. Birds and strange other notices. To a girl from a farm off Lake Ontario in upstate New York, WOW! Kind of scary but totally unforgettable! Sorry to hear it is closed to public now. Hope that changes. Everyone thinks of the West as the last frontier of the 20th century but if you talk to people who grew up south of South Miami you soon learn a fascinating history of some of the real last pioneers! My husband’s grandmother was 1 of 2 of the first telephone operators brought from Atlanta to Miami to help run the exchange. Her daughter, my husbands’ mother, used to kid that she went to school in a dugout canoe! Not true but a great story! Her father was a moonshine maker whose still was busted up by the Feds! Years later my husband scouted the area he was told where the still was, off Old Cutler Rd., and actually found the sink hole and brought back an old style milk can he found!! Lots of good stories. Well thanks for listening and good luck with the hammock.

  4. I am a regular bike rider out at Chekika and would support any causes. Since the road has been closed off except for biking or walking, access is now very limited. A bike offers the best advantages and I think making it a known biking opportunity will help bring it back much like Shark Valley, which is popular for riders there. We have miles of paved roads out there. With the new gravel roads for flooding more wading birds have been showing up.

  5. My father, Ernest Martin, was a park ranger there. We lived inside the State Park, in the late 70’s.

  6. I lived down the street (SW 168th Street) east of the Hammock from 1981-1989 and my folks until 2013. I did one of my high school science fair projects on the water chemistry from the artesian sulfur water pouring out of the former petroleum well. A gentleman from the USGS or Florida Geological Survey (i think?) helped me to understand the history of the well and provided me copies of the original caliper logs for the entire borehole. I’ve long since lost those copies but I can confirm, based on my sampling of the Grossman well water back in 1986 or ’87 and sampling of shallow potable water supply wells for farms and residences downstream, that a clearly definable sulfur plume was contaminating a LOT of shallow surface water downgradient of that well. Still, I sure loved swimming in the upper pond, playing with the white slimy deposits left by the sulfur bacteria on the protruding well head, and keeping a wary eye out for gators that might have moved from the lower pond into the upper pond.

  7. M. L. Grossman was able to recover ownership of much of land for the Grossman family under the 1937 Murphy Act which provided for land owners to recover ownership of the land by paying a negotiated amount of back taxes and thus returning land to tax generating property. The final parcel of land owned by the Grossman family was sold to the state of Florida for park land in 1970

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