by Jeff Blakley

This chapter will not cover much geographical territory – only the swath of South Dade from the Deering Estate west to where MetroZoo is now, but it will provide the reader with information not easily found anywhere else.

The first known settler in Cutler, which was named for Dr. William C. Cutler, was John A. Addison, who came in 1864. Charles Seibold came in the early 1870s. By the time James H. Young brought his sawmill to Cutler, the controversy over the ownership of the Perrine Grant had been resolved and the Grant was the home of numerous settlers. The sawmills of James H. Young and the Easterling Brothers on the Perrine Grant are covered here but Charles T. McCrimmon and his brother D. Frank, also cut trees on the Grant. Those men will be covered in Chapter 4.

James H. Young

James Henry Young, born in Ohio near Cleveland in 1852,¹ started his career in the sawmill business by 1880 in Au Gres, Michigan, where he was enumerated in the census that year as an engineer. In 1885, he may have worked for the Wright & Ketcham Co., a large lumber company in Averill, which is about 60 miles southwest of Au Gres. A J. H. Young suffered a broken leg in an accident at one of Wright & Ketcham’s roll aways near Averill.² A roll away was where locomotives stopped to unload logs from the flat cars they were pulling. The logs were rolled down an embankment into the Tittabawasee River. By 1888, he and his family lived in Bunnell, Florida.³

In 1895, Young was a foreman at one of the mills owned by Fairhead & Strawn, a very big lumber company headquartered in Jacksonville. While working there, he accidentally fell against a running saw blade, severely cutting his leg.⁴ It is not known, but that accident may have been what motivated him to go into business for himself. At that time, Young and his family lived in Bayard, which is about halfway between Palatka and Bunnell.⁵ By 1897, the Youngs had moved down to Bunnell, from where they sent their twin daughters, Maggie and Aggie, to school in Jacksonville.⁶ James apparently did not spend much time in Bunnell, for in January of 1898, the Florida Times-Union reported that he had stayed at a hotel in Miami.⁷ He was apparently scouting out a location to move his sawmill to, because on July 7, 1899, the Miami Weekly Metropolis reported that a man named Young had taken two carloads of machinery down to a location “back of Cutler … [to] start a mill.”⁸ The Florida Times-Union printed an article about all of the activity taking place on the Perrine Grant. In that article, it was stated that “Mr. J. H. Young of Bonnell (sic) has moved his sawmill there and will be ready to supply lumber to the settlers in about two months.”⁹ Jean Taylor, in her 1976 article published in Update, wrote that Young’s sawmill was brought from Jacksonville to Lemon City and transferred to a boat to take it to Cutler because Miami was under quarantine for yellow fever. As is so often the case with Taylor, she was incorrect. Yellow fever was brought to Miami by Samuel R. Anderson, who arrived in Miami on board the S. S. Key West on August 31, 1899. A quarantine was put into place by Dr. Jackson for all arrivals from Key West on September 1.¹⁰ A look at the survey of the Perrine Grant, done in 1906 by Samuel H. Richmond, shows a considerable amount of pineland in the immediate vicinity of the settlement of Cutler. The existing buildings had been erected using lumber brought from Miami but with the arrival of Young’s sawmill, that changed.

The Cutler Dock as seen from the Richmond Cottage

Young’s sawmill was in operation by the first part of March of 1900, when it was reported that the “piles for the wharf extension are now cut and the new saw mill is making the lumber as fast as the saw can run.”¹¹ The record about Young’s activities in the Perrine Grant were not documented after the note about the lumber for the wharf being cut. It is a safe bet, though, that he stayed busy cutting lumber for all of the settlers who were pouring into the Perrine Grant and building houses. Once Young had cut all of the marketable timber near Cutler and after Richmond Dr. had been extended west to Perrine, he moved his mill closer to the F.E.C. railroad tracks to continue sawing lumber.¹² In 1907, after supplying lumber for the booming settlement of Perrine, Young moved south to Princeton.¹³ There is no record of what Young did in Princeton but given his long experience with sawmills, it is very likely he worked for the Drake Lumber Co., which cut its first log on November 15, 1907.¹⁴ He didn’t stay long in Perrine, though, as the 1910 census of King County, Washington showed him working there as a millwright for a lumber company.¹⁵ By 1912, Young, recently widowed, was back in Princeton, where his daughter Margaret lived with her husband John L. Murray. Murray’s homestead, which he claimed in July of 1906, became the residential section of Princeton – the area south and east of the intersection of U. S. 1 and Coconut Palm Dr.

The Easterling Brothers

The Easterling Bros. grew canteloupes and other melons on thousands of acres in five different locations: Martin, FL;¹⁶ Albany, GA; Parkton, SC; Barnwell, NC and Salisbury, MD. Their headquarters were in Barnwell, NC and they were said to be the “largest cantaloupe and melon growers in the world” in a piece originally published in the Fruit and Produce News and reprinted in the Miami Metropolis in 1904.¹⁷ In July of 1902, J. E. Ingraham, third vice-president of the Florida East Coast Railway, in the company of Ethan V. Blackman, editor of the Florida East Coast Homeseeker¹⁸ and Samuel H. Richmond, took some of the principals of the Easterling Bros. on a two-day tour of the Perrine Grant.¹⁹ The result of that tour was that the company bought 650 acres of land.²⁰ By 1904, according to the Miami city directory of that year,²¹ the Easterlings owned three entire sections.²² The sections listed were 13, 18, 19 and 26. 13, 18, and 19 were on the west edge of the Perrine Grant and about 50% finger glade and 50% pineland. The boundaries of those sections were SW 104th St. on the north, SW 107th Avenue on the east, SW 136th St. on the south and SW 127th Ave. on the west. The inclusion of section 26 in the directory notice was likely an error, as that was a heavily populated area that included the settlement of Cutler.

The Florida East Coast Homeseeker claimed that the Easterlings had purchased more than 650 acres: 2,200 to be exact. It also said that “[l]ater in the season they will bring a sawmill and locate it on their own lands for the purpose of furnishing their own lumber for the construction of the necessary buildings, and at the same time clearing their land.”²³ Whether that sawmill was built is not known but it likely was, because the Ocala Evening Star reported on September 20 that the Easterling Bros. had moved all of their livestock from their farm in Martin to their farm in Miami.²⁴

The company planted tomatoes, beans, lettuce and cabbage on its land in the fall of 1902.²⁵ Everything went well until a torrential rainstorm flooded the Cutler prairies on March 16, 1903 with the result that half of the tomato crop was drowned out.²⁶ As a result of that disaster, Ingraham visted the future site of the town of Perrine, inspected the lands of T. J. Peters and the Easterling and noted that, for the protection of the growers, “the main drain ditch [would] have to be widened and extended and the ditch made more secure.”²⁷ The Easterlings, accustomed to the setbacks involved in agriculture, stated that they would be back to plant again in the fall.²⁸ However, they moved all of their stock, workers and vehicles back to Martin.²⁹

The crop planted in Miami in the fall of 1903 “was not of a character to encourage” the Easterlings, so they made the decision in the summer of 1904 not to continue in Miami.³⁰ The crop in Martin was only marginally profitable in the 1904-1905 season so the Easterlings pulled out of Florida entirely.³¹ What happened to their holdings in Miami? That might be able to be determined from studying property deeds. The sawmill was likely sold to a local person who put it to good use.

The Tropico Lumber & Mercantile Company

The Tropico Lumber & Mercantile Co. was owned by the Lindsay Lumber Company. Its story starts with a trip to Miami by John M. Schilling and Edward T. Harwood in late August of 1910. The were shown property all around the county by a representative of the Richardson-Kellett Co., a prominent real estate dealer in Miami, but left without making a purchase.³² In December of that year, Mervin M. Chesrown, who was a well-known Chicago real estate dealer, came to Miami and bought the 2,600 acre Cedars property.³³ He quickly flipped that property to the Tatum Bros. Real Estate & Investment Co., which included it as part their ambitious development project they named Detroit. In March of 1911, Schilling and his associates, which likely included Chesrown, returned to Miami and purchased 5,000 acres of land twenty-two miles south of Miami in the “fertile red soil district” from the Model Land Company.³⁴ Schilling, who was a salesman in Chicago for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co. of Pittsburgh, set up an office in the lobby of the Seminole Hotel in Miami to sell land in their newly created Tropico Plantation and hired the firm of Frederick & Brown to survey the property. They completed the job the next month, in April.^{35 36}

Plat of Tropico

The plat shown here only shows the portion of the purchase that was subdivided into lots. The boundaries of this plat are SW 127th Avenue on the east, SW 208th Street on the south, SW 147th Avenue on the west and SW 152nd Street on the north. The unplatted portions of this survey were all claimed as homesteads with the exception of the SW 1/4 of the NW 1/4 and the NE 1/4 of the SW 1/4 of 2-56-39. That was mostly swamp land and not of any use to anyone at that time.

The Little Wolf River Lumber Company was established in Manawa, WI in 1892. At that time, James W. Meiklejohn was the president, W. H. Hatten the vice-president, Arthur Lindsay the treasurer/manager and George R. Lindsay the secretary.³⁷ In 1894, Arthur Lindsay was charged with dumping sawdust and other waste material from the sawmill into the Little Wolf River.³⁸

In January of 1913, George R. Lindsay, on his first visit to Miami, learned of the Tropical Plantation project that the Chicago men had started in 1911. In March, the Miami Metropolis reported that Arthur Lindsay, the vice-president of the Little Wolf River Lumber Co. and father of George, had purchased a timber lease on 2,000 acres south of Perrine.³⁹ In short order, a new corporation, the Tropico Lumber & Mercantile Company was established. In early May, it was reported that the officers of the new company were to be George R. Lindsay, president; L. Walker, vice-president and manager; W. C. Thomas, secretary and J. E. Thomas, treasurer.⁴⁰ Later that month, the same newspaper reported that George had filed for Letters Patent for the company, which was to cut and mill lumber on 5,000 acres of land near Perrine. The sawmill that was to be built would have a capacity of 25,000 feet per day and the lumber would be transported to the F.E.C. Railway in Perrine via a nearly 4-mile-long branch railroad.⁴¹

The company wasted no time in starting work: the first lumber, cut on July 18, was likely from trees cut to clear a route for the rail spur they were building between the mill site and Perrine. That project had started in early May and was labor intensive.⁴² They had hoped to have the spur built by the end of July but it wasn’t until early September that the “golden spike” was driven.The mill was far from finished, though, as the company, which had put Mr. Thomas and his brother-in-law, Mr. Walker, in charge of building it, were still awaiting the arrival of the planing machine. They had employed 60 men and paid out $90/day in labor over a period of six weeks. The construction of the sawmill had started in early July and was completed in early September.⁴³

Like the Drake Lumber Co., the Tropico Lumber & Mercantile Co. had its own locomotive. The spur was likely a logging railroad, not intended to be permanent, as these kinds of railroads were commonly built by lumber companies. The route of the line has not been determined but it probably ran parallel to Richmond Dr., which is SW 168th St. Richmond had been extended from about SW 94th Avenue west to what was, in 1949, Tropico Rd. (now SW 137th Ave.) before 1914. That was when a group of Perrine residents petitioned the County to make it a County road.⁴⁴ The petition demonstrated that the road already existed – it is likely that it and the tram line were built at the same time.

A portion of the 1949 U. S. Geological Survey map of the Goulds Quadrangle

The medium-duty road shown as running below the Richmond Blimp base (U S Naval Station) is Richmond Dr. The settlement of Tropico, later called Aventina, where the sawmill, a commissary, school, post office and several packing houses were located, was at the intersection of Richmond Dr. and Tropico Road.

A school was opened November of 1915 for the children in Aventina.⁴⁵ but closed in June of 1916. The students were then transported to the school in Perrine.⁴⁶ A Miss Adams, from Miami, was the only teacher hired by Dade County for the Aventina school.⁴⁷ Mann G. Davis was appointed postmaster for Aventina in 1918 but it closed in 1924. He was also a principal in the firm Ford, Rembert & Davis, which operated the cars on the tramline to Perrine.^{48 49} There were several packing houses in Tropico, which packed tomatoes for Will I. Peters (brother of Tom J., the Tomato King) and other large growers.⁵⁰ The availability of packing houses closer to their fields than Perrine was a welcome development for the growers, as it saved them a five-mile wagon trip. During the harvesting season, they hauled from 20 to 30 carloads of tomatoes per week to Perrine over the tram line.⁵¹

The Lindsay Lumber Company⁵²

The first documented shipment of lumber from the sawmill was “about twenty-five cars of ties” sent to New York on board the schooner Victor C. Records in August of 1914. The ties were not regular ties; they were switch ties, which are longer and are used where trains can be switched to another track.⁵³ In 1916, the Lindsay Lumber Co. was pushing for the deepening of the harbor in Miami because most of the five lumber schooners they owned drew too much water to dock there. Instead, the company shipped its lumber by rail to Key West to be shipped to the West Indies from there. But they encountered a problem there, too, because the FEC had declared an embargo on lumber shipments by ferry to Cuba because there wasn’t enough profit in it for them. The article, which was not written by a Miami Herald reporter, claimed that Dade County benefited by “having its land cleared of timber.”⁵⁴ In 1918, H. P. Cone, the office manager, stated that “[e]very bit of the output from our sawmills has always gone to these islands, save that since the war the government has called upon us for part of our product and we have been furnishing it to them.”⁵⁵

In September of 1919, the company shipped between 8 and 10 cars of lumber a week.⁵⁶ In 1921, George R. Lindsay was quoted as saying that the company shipped 150 cars of lumber a month via the FEC Key West Extension and the ferry to Havana. Of the cargo in those cars, one-third of it was of pine cut in Dade County and the remaining two-thirds was of pine from “northern Florida and Georgia.”⁵⁷

By 1924, however, the supply of pine in Dade County had been exhausted and the company was exclusively exporting lumber shipped to Miami from Georgia.⁵⁸ Like the Drake Lumber Co. in Princeton, which operated from 1907 until 1919, the Lindsay Lumber Company’s exploitation of the timber resources of Dade County lasted just 11 years – from 1913 to 1924. On May 30, 1924, the company, which had confined itself “to the strictly wholesale and export trade and [had] shipped enormous amounts of their product to Cuba, Porto Rico and the Bahama Islands,” opened a retail outlet in a two-story building at 1444 N. Miami Ave.⁵⁹that had formerly been used as a fruit processing plant.⁶⁰ The Lindsay Lumber Co. was located just a block south of the retail outlet of the Drake Lumber Co., which was at 1536 N. Miami Avenue.

In 1929, George and his brother Robert sold their company, it being one of the many business failures during the Great Depression.⁶¹ Robert returned home to Manawa, WI, where he died on July 13, 1937. George stayed in Miami until he and his wife moved to Hendersonville, NC in about 1936. His wife died in Manawa in 1937 and George died in Asheville, NC in 1947.

Today, there is no trace of the tramline that once moved lumber and vegetables from Aventina to Perrine. Settlements like Aventina were common across Florida and the United States. When the timber had all been cut down, the people left for jobs in other locations. The last mention of Aventina in the Miami newspapers was in 1929, the same year the Lindsays sold their company.

It is interesting to speculate why the Drake Lumber Co. is so well-known in the existing literature and no mention is made of the Lindsay Lumber Co. Because no comprehensive history of sawmills in this area has ever been published, the many articles published in the newspapers about the Drake Lumber Co. ensured that it would take first place in the minds of readers. That abundant publicity was due, in part, to the fact that the Lindsays were Yankees in a Deep South city and that they were here for less than 20 years. In contrast, Gaston Drake was brought to Florida at a young age, came to Miami before 1900 and died here in 1955. He also had a strong connection to the power brokers in Miami, one of them being Frank Shutts, who founded the law firm of Shutts & Bowen.⁶²

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1. 1860 census of Blooming Grove Twp., Richland, Ohio
2. The Saginaw News, May 13, 1885, p. 2
3. Obituary of Abigail Gregg Young, who died in 1912. It said Abigail had lived in Florida for 24 years. —Miami Metropolis, March 5, 1912, p. 5.
4. Florida Times-Union, April 26, 1895, p. 7
5. Florida Times-Union, June 18, 1895, p. 3 and Sept. 21, 1895, p. 8
6. Florida Times-Union, October 7, 1897, p. 2
7. Florida Times-Union, January 6, 1898, p. 3
8. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 7, 1899, p. 1
9. Florida Times-Union, July 2, 1899, p. 2
10. Casey Piket, Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1899
11. Miami Weekly Metropolis, March 9, 1900, p. 8
12. Stories of Life in South Dade, Carl Schumacher, n.d., p. 51
13. Miami Metropolis, Oct. 26, 1907, p. 2
14. Miami Metropolis, November 16, 1907, p. 1
15. 1910 census of Boise Precinct, King, WA, sheet 3-B, line 79
16. This was in Marion County, near Ocala
17. Miami Metropolis, June 21, 1904, p. 3
18. This magazine was a marketing publication funded by the FEC
19. The Florida Star, July 4, 1902, p. 1
20. Miami Metropolis, April 4, 1902, p. 1
21. The data for which was from 1903
22. Official Directory of the City of Miami and Nearby Towns, Illustrated, Miami, Fla., Allan R. Parrish, Publisher, 1904, p. 123.
23. Florida East Coast Homeseeker, September, 1902, p. 5
24. Ocala Evening Star, Sept. 20, 1902, p. 1
25. Ocala Evening Star, Sept. 20, 1902, p. 1
26. Miami Weekly Metropolis, March 20, 1903, p. 2
27. Miami Weekly Metropolis, March 20, 1903
28. Ocala Evening Star, April 17, 1903, p. 4
29. Ocala Evening Star, March 30, 1903, p. 3
30. Ocala Evening Star, Nov. 14, 1904, p. 2
31. Ocala Evening Star, Dec. 20, 1905, p. 1
32. Miami Metropolis, August 29, 1910, p. 1
33. Chesrown owned many other properties in Florida besides the Cedars.
34. Using the acreage figures for the sub-divided land in the plat shown below and a list of parcels for which the Miami Home Development Co. owed taxes on in 1920, the purchase seems to have been for 4,416.95 acres. This number could be a “more-or-less” figure as actual acreage often differs from the amount of acres in the subdivisions of townships.
35. Miami Metropolis, March 16, 1911, p. 1
36. In the surveying firm name, ‘Frederick’ was Thomas E. “Ted” Frederick, the son of John S. Frederick, the surveyor who helped lay out the City of Miami. ‘Brown’ was William E. Brown. When that partnership dissolved, Brown went on to found Biscayne Engineering, the name of the surveyors shown on the plat. Biscayne Engineering is still in existence, the oldest surveying company in Miami-Dade County.
37. Undated and unsourced document displayed on the Find A Grave memorial for Arthur Carroll Lindsay, one of George R.’s brothers
38. The Oshkosh Northwestern, Nov. 10, 1885, p. 3 and May 30, 1894, p. 1
39. Miami Metropolis, March 26, 1913, p. 1. Information on the Little Wolf River Lumber Co. seems to be almost non-existent, so independent confirmation of Arthur’s title is not possible.
40. Miami Metropolis, May 7, 1913, p. 2. Despite a diligent search, the identities of L. Walker and the Thomases remain unknown.
41. Miami Metropolis, May 29, 1913, p. 5
42. The Miami Herald, July 19, 1913, p. 8
43. Miami Metropolis, Sept. 8, 1913, p. 3
44. Miami Metropolis, August 22, 1914, p. 5
45. Miami Metropolis, Sept. 23, 1915, p. 1
46. Miami Metropolis, Sept. 6, 1916, p. 8
47. Miami Metropolis, Nov. 2, 1915, p. 3
48. Miami Metropolis, August 10, 1918, p. 2
49. The Miami Herald, June 29, 1920, p. 1
50. Miami Metropolis, April 3, 1916, p. 3
51. Miami Metropolis, May 21, 1915, p. 21
52. The Miami Herald, October 15, 1916, p. 21
53. The Miami Herald, August 2, 1914, p. 8.
54. The Miami Herald, Oct. 15, 1916, p. 27
55. Miami Metropolis, Nov. 16, 1918, p. 3
56. Miami Metropolis, January 29, 1919, p. 12
57. Miami Herald, April 5, 1921, p. 8
58. Miami Tribune, August 17, 1924, p. 14
59. The Miami Herald, May 30, 1924, p. 5
60. This was the location of the fruit processing company owned by Charles T. McCrimmon.
61. The Miami Herald, July 14, 1937, p. 15
62. My thanks to Pat O’Connell, who wrote an article published in Tequesta in 2021, Princeton’s Gaston Drake and the Opening of the Florida Frontier, for bringing this to my attention.