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.

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.”
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1. Charles T. Simpson, Native and Exotic, Journal of the Florida Horticultural Society, 1912, p. 170
2. John C. Gifford, 1946, Ten Trustworthy Tropical Trees. Gard. Book Club Ser. 2, No. 7, Organic Gard., Emmaus, Pa. 92 pp.
3. 1880 census of Elizabeth City, NC
4. Miami Metropolis, September 24, 1897, p. 5
5. Miami Metropolis, October 21, 1897, p. 4
6. Miami Metropolis, October 15, 1897, p. 1
7. Charles J. Peacock was a brother of John T. Peacock, the father of Harry R., who boarded with Jennings in 1900. The Rowena was a schooner engaged in the coastal trade, moving freight from Miami to Key West and points in between. It also participated in the salvage of the Spanish ship Alicia.
8. Ibid, p. 5
9. The Weekly Tribune, Tampa, Florida, June 30, 1898, p. 2
10. 1900 census of Precinct 4, Miami, Dade, FL
11. Miami Metropolis, December 6, 1901, p. 2
12. Miami Metropolis, January 10, 1902, p. 5
13. Miami Metropolis, Oct. 7, 1898, p. 8
14. Miami Metropolis, January 27, 1899, p. 8
15. Miami Metropolis, March 29, 1901, p. 1
16. South Florida Banner, January 9, 1914, p. 6
17. Miami Metropolis, March 7, 1902, p. 5
18. Miami Evening Record, May 11, 1905, p. 8
19. Miami Evening Record, July 17, 1905, p. 8
20. Miami Evening Record, July 26, 1905, p. 8
21. The Weekly True Democrat, Tallahassee, FL, June 22, 1906, p. 2
22. Miami Herald, July 21, 1911, p. 14
23. Miami Metropolis, July 31, 1907, p. 4
24. Miami Metropolis, December 9, 1910, p. 1
25. Miami Metropolis, July 12, 1901, p. 1
26. sic – this refers to sections 3, 9, and 8 in township 56-40
27. Section 17 is directly south of section 8
28. The extension of Silver Palm Dr. first requested
29. sic: 57 – 39
30. Miami Metropolis, July 12, 1901, p. 1
31. Miami Evening Record, October 21, 1904, p. 1
32. Ibid
33. Miami Metropolis, September 2, 1911, p. 2