1916 Courthouse - The Historical Society's mission is to collect, preserve and share the history of Palm Beach County. The organization maintains an active research facility in the Paramount Building in Palm Beach. The collections, which are continually growing, relate to the heritage of all communities in Palm Beach County.

Richard and Pat Johnson
Donate $1.25 Million to
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Puddle Jumpers of Lantana (DVD)
The Civil Air Patrol's Coastal Patrol 3

DVD purchase price $19.99 plus shipping and handling

To order contact: Historical Society of Palm Beach County at phone 561-832-4164

Just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Civil Air Patrol was established as part of the Office of Civilian Defense. In January 1942, Germany launched Operation Drumbeat sending U-boats across the Atlantic Ocean to attack vulnerable allied shipping along the U.S. east and Gulf coasts. In response to this threat, the CAP established the first anti-submarine patrol bases with the mission of searching for, and reporting U-boat activity, and to assist damaged ships and survivors. For seventeen months Coastal Patrol 3 flew between Palm Beach County and Cape Canaveral, Florida, searching for enemy U-boats, torpedoed ships, and survivors.

Coastal Patrol 3: Puddle Jumpers of Lantana, is the story of one CAP unit. Hosted by Palm Beach County native, film star, and producer, Monte Markham, the fascinating story of Coastal Patrol Base 3 is brought to life by the recollections of the five surviving members who reflect on their days chasing German submarines. Join Monte Markham as he weaves this little known, yet inspiring tale of action on Florida's home front during World War II.

The program was made possible through a grant by the Marshall E. Rinker, Sr. Foundation, Inc, and the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.

West Palm Beach: 1893 to 1950
By Lynn Lasseter Drake and Richard A. Marconi

$19.99 Soft Cover, 128 pp.

Published by Arcadia Publishing
www.arcadiapublishing.com

Arcadia Publishing adds to its Images of America series with West Palm Beach: 1893 to 1950 ($19.99/ 128 pages/ softcover) by Lynn Lasseter Drake and Richard A. Marconi in conjunction with the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. The book illustrates the history of the area from its official designation as a city through WWII, and includes some photographs that have never previously been circulated.

Drake is a historical researcher and genealogist specializing in southeast Florida pioneer history. She also authored Jupiter, another title in the Images of America series. Marconi has been with the Historical Society since 1999, initially as an intern and volunteer. He is now on staff as the Society's education coordinator.

"This history of West Palm Beach is fascinating at so many levels," said Marconi. "Lynn and I chose more than 200 images to illustrate the stories about local people who had an impact on the growth and success of the city, and the tragic events such as hurricanes, fires and floods that defined the fate of the community."

West Palm Beach was established in 1894, two decades after pioneers first arrived in the wilderness at Lake Worth. In 1893, Henry M. Flagler, Standard Oil magnate and Florida railroad mogul, finalized plans to extend his Florida East Coast Railroad south in order to turn Palm Beach into a winter playground for the rich. West Palm Beach was designed as the mainland commercial and residential support for his new resort. From its humble beginnings, it has become Palm Beach County's largest city and the seat of government. "Our hope is that readers become enamored with West Palm Beach's past, and recognize why we want to preserve it for the future," Drake adds.

Lila Vanderbilt Webb’s Miradero
Window on an Era By Roberrt W. Ganger

$35.00 Hard Cover, 184 pp., 169 illust;
8 1⁄2 x 11 1⁄2 "
(shrink-wrapped)
12 pack carton/24 lbs.

Published by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County
139 North County Road, Suite 25, Palm Beach, FL 33480
(561) 832-4164
www.historicalsocietypbc.org

ISBN: 0-9764242-0-7
LCCN: 20044117634

Distribution Contacts:

Florida
Past Perfect Florida History, Inc.
640 Ocean Ave, #3,
Boynton Beach, FL 33435
(888) 828 7822 ppfh@bellsouth.net

New England
Images From the Past
P.O. Box 137,
Bennington, VT 05201
(888) 442-3204
tordis@imagesfromthepast.com

For readers who are captivated by tales of the Vanderbilt dynasty, Gilded Age lifestyles, country estates, and Palm Beach in its heyday, Miradero offers a unique and richly illustrated glimpse into the people and places of a storied era.

The heroine is Eliza (Lila) Osgood Vanderbilt Webb (1860-1936). Born into the wealthiest family in the nation, Lila’s sheltered upbringing left her ill-prepared for challenges she would face later in life. Fortunately she inherited grandfather Commodore Vanderbilt’s common sense and tenacity. Lila not only coped; she prevailed.

The story traces Lila’s life from her privileged childhood, to her marriage to a dashing and worldly young physician, and ultimately to Vermont where she and husband Seward Webb, now a railroad magnate, reigned over their great country estate, Shelburne Farms. Approaching mid-life, Lila’s mythically grand existence began to unravel. With the help of Lila’s surviving grandchildren, author Robert Ganger explores a Victorian woman’s reaction to physical, emotional and economic adversity, concluding that she proved to be remarkably able, resilient, and ahead of her times in taking control of her life.

Lila and Seward Webb first arrived in Palm Beach in the late 1890s, joining with Vanderbilt kin to help establish Henry Flagler’s new resort as America’s Riviera. Lila remained a prominent

fixture in Palm Beach society for three decades. Widowed, she moved to nearby Gulf Stream, Florida, where she designed her winter home, Miradero, to fulfill a lifetime goal.

“The fascinating story of Lila Vanderbilt Webb far transcends interest here in the Sunshine State, and we are fortunate that a local author was inspired to tell the world about the woman who built his house, and was once one of our distinguished neighbors. Through Bob Ganger’s inquiring mind, a window has opened on an era that we can hardly imagine today”.
Harvey Oyer III, Chairman of the Board Historical Society of Palm Beach County

Author Robert Ganger’s family acquired Miradero in 1969, saving it from certain destruction. His ambitious project to restore the home prompted research on its original owner. Mr. Ganger is a retired corporate executive who is active in local historic preservation.

Black Gold and Silver Sands
A Pictorial History of Agriculture in Palm Beach County by James D. Snyder

Black Gold and Silver Sands

224 pages, 254 black and white photographs

Author: James D. Snyder
Publisher: Historical Society of Palm Beach County
ISBN: 0967-5200-5-3
Price: $39.95
Where available: HSPBC office and local bookstores.
To order call (561) 832-4164. Signed gift copies available.

For most of us, the hurricanes of September 2004 meant a fallen tree or shredded pool enclosure. For Wayne A. Boynton and his 3,000 acres of sugar cane, it meant blowing out two pumping stations, the roofs of two large tractor repair-parking sheds and a mobile home. Soggy fields delayed his usual early October cane planting until late November and – worse yet – the extensive damage to seed cane means that the 2005 crop will be well short of the 2004 output. Yet, Boynton also wears an invisible badge of courage, one that his grandfather earned and which all tillers of the soil have worn since early pioneers began growing pumpkins and potatoes in the sands around Lake Worth . Together, despite floods, frosts, draught, disease and Depression, they kept planting. And in just over a hundred years, they built the powerful agribusiness economy that underpins Palm Beach County today.

The story of that dogged determination is the essence of Black Gold and Silver Sands, A Pictorial History of Agriculture in Palm Beach County , which debuted in December 2004. Authored by James D. Snyder and marking the first book to be published by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County in many years. The handsome coffee-table book is a dramatic documentary of family struggle, told through letters, interviews and some 250 photographs gleaned from local museums and private collections.

Typical of the stories in Black Gold are those of just three families whose lives spanned the whole continuum of farming in the county. Hannibal H. Pierce, an assistant keeper at the Jupiter Lighthouse, became one of the first pioneers in 1872 when he took his wife Margretta and eight-year-old son Charles down a mysterious, uncharted creek that led to a pristine, 23-mile-long lagoon called Lake Worth.

For months the Pierces lived in a crude driftwood hut while planting their first pumpkins and sweet potatoes. They ate turtle eggs and drank coffee Mrs. Pierce ground from sweet potatoes. Their first Christmas dinner featured stuffed opossum. For cash, the family would scavenge shipwrecked copper and brass, load it in their homemade skiff and haul it up the Indian River to a scrap dealer in Sand Point (today’s Titusville).

Hannibal’s son Charles wrote eloquently about those years, and from him we learn about each new settler family and the emergence of a cash economy. For Charlie himself, it began with a teenager’s yen to have a violin.

It so happened that one of the keepers at the Jupiter Lighthouse had a violin he’d let go for $6. At the time, people were discovering that pineapples grew well in the silver sands around Lake Worth, and Charlie’s uncle Will Moore had managed to acquire some 6,000 young pineapple slips. When Moore announced he was going to Titusville for supplies, young Charlie offered to plant the 6,000 pineapple slips for $6 if he’d bring back the violin.

By noon [of the first day] I had trimmed one thousand plants. After eating lunch in a hurry, I started setting the plants. This was done by stretching a line over the row where the plants were to be set. This line had little pieces of cloth every eighteen inches. A plant was dropped at every mark on the line; then with a short thick pointed stick called a dibber, the plants were set. By keeping steadily at it, the last of the thousand plants were in the ground an hour and a half before sundown.

Six days I labored, and on the seventh I went hunting. Six thousand plants were in the ground and I had earned my violin.

In 1925, the pineapples of the eastern seaboard had already given way to farm fields of beans and tomatoes. Charlie Pierce had his own family and had already been postmaster of Boynton Beach for 17 years when another “pioneer” would arrive and add new dimensions to agriculture. Palm Beach County had just one agricultural extension agent for all of its 1,261,000 million acres and the vast, sparsely cultivated Everglades beckoned farmers from up north with its tales of muck that produced like “black gold.” When the decision came to hire a second extension agent, it was a marriage made in heaven for Marvin Umphrey “Red” Mounts.

Raised on an Oklahoma farm and just fresh out of the University of Florida ag school, Mounts saw himself as a preacher of the modern farming gospel to a parish full of farmers who often wore bigger blinders than their mules. At the time, the Extension Service was housed in the old County Courthouse, and at least once a week Mounts would make the two-day roundtrip out to the Belle Glade and Pahokee farmlands using river barges and the old Conners toll road.

Along the way, Red Mounts showed cattlemen how to breed Cracker cows with beefier types from up north and how to fatten them faster with new strains of grasses. He soon persuaded farmers to expand their staples of beans and tomatoes to 18 other vegetable crops. He collected soil samples and helped identify where nutrients were needed. He preached the need to raise mangos, avocados and other tropical fruits, not just as cash crops, but as a way for farm families to maintain healthier diets.

Mounts imposed no boundaries on his job. When not in the field he’d compile farming statistics, organize 4-H clubs, lecture to garden clubs and preach the gospel of agriculture at school career days. Within four years Mounts was chief extension agent, on his way to expanding an office that would have 12 assistants.

Typical of the farm families Red Mounts would encounter on his trips were the Boyntons of Pahokee. Henry Grady Boynton first came to Pahokee from upstate in 1928 when he answered a call for volunteers to help search for bodies left behind by the infamous hurricane. He found none, but was so awed by the rich black soil that he stayed to farm vegetables on a small plot.

When a frost wiped out the south Florida vegetable market in the mid-thirties, Boynton’s cabbage crop, sheltered in the lea of the lake’s eastern ridge, fetched a whopping $40,000 and enabled him to buy a square mile (640 acres).

Another Boynton added to the family holdings during World War II. Henry’s son Joe Tom had been studying agriculture at the University of Georgia when the war transplanted him to an army base in Oklahoma. There he learned that the state of Florida, to help boost food production, was about to put some square-mile tracts up for auction. Joe Tom prevailed on his young wife, Helen, still a college student in Georgia, to be at the courthouse in Tallahassee when bidding began. When no one else showed up, the young Boyntons had their own square mile of farmland.

Back then the family crops were mostly beans and cabbage, with lots of land left for beef cattle. But as the 1960s progressed and Fidel Castro reserved all of Cuba’s sugar for the Communist bloc, new opportunities emerged for raising cane in south Florida. Today, Joe Tom’s son Wayne grows cane exclusively on what is now 3,000 acres. In the 2003-04 crop year his J. T. Boynton Farms, Inc. achieved the highest efficiency level – 54.6 tons per acre – among the 54 member farms in the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida.

With that growing efficiency are similar improvements in environmental stewardship among those who farm the 707,000-acre Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). “Today,” says Wayne Boynton, “the water leaving our lands towards the Everglades National Park is cleaner than when we receive it from rainfall and Lake Okeechobee.”

Boynton is also known for his own environmental innovation. Ever since farming began in South Florida, rats have helped themselves to as much as twenty percent of the crops. Barn owls are valuable in suppressing the rat population, but by the early 1980s the owls were disappearing along with barns and Australian pines – their favorite habitats.

Boynton’s response was to build barn owl nesting boxes on poles in his fields. Sure enough, the owls returned. Today more than 700 boxes are spread throughout the EAA. Says Boynton: “That may not seem like many for such a big area until you realize that one pair of nesting owls can kill five times their weight per day. That adds up to 1,500 rats a year for each pair.”