Florida Keys A History & Guide

The Upper Keys Key Largo to Long Key The Spanish first found the Keys during Ponce de Leon's 1513 expedition and promptly called them, with inquisitional flair, Los Martires-the martyrs-because they seemed twisted and tortured. They logged out the mahogany that grew here early on, and probably enslaved the native Caloosa Indians, but they were indifferent to exploring or settling these stony islands. There was no gold, no fresh water, and many, many bugs. They mapped and named the Keys principally as an aid to their ships, which, laden with gold and silver, used the Florida Straits as their route from the New World back to the Old. The first settlement in the Keys was at Cayo Hueso, or Key West, in 1822, more than two decades before Florida became a state. The other keys remained pretty much deserted until 1874, when the government surveyed them and plotted land for homesteading. The early homes were primitive, built from the local "coastal store"?the beach'with wood and materials washed up from shipwrecks. The biggest plague of the settlers was mosquitoes. The mosquito was king of the Keys. Mosquitoes blackened the sides of houses and obscured the shapes of animals. Mosquitoes blackened the cheesecloth which people swathed their heads in as they slept. If you swung a pint cup, the saying went, you'd come up with a quart full of mosquitoes. Smudge pots burned constantly inside and outside the driftwood houses. Burlap bags filled with wood chips soaked in old engine oil were hung to drip over stagnant water holes in an attempt to kill mosquito larvae. With mosquitoes gnawing on them day and night, a few pioneering families nevertheless managed to claw a living from what one writer of the time referred to as "worthless, chaotic fragments of coral reef, limestone and mangrove swamp." The people who first made their homes in the Upper Keys were hardworking Methodist fishermen and farmers. They spoke with a Cockney accent, were closely interrelated, and bore the names Albury, Pinder, Johnson, Russell, and Lowe. Their more flamboyant wrecking neighbors were in Key West, but life in the "outside keys" was earnestly drab, farming rock being somewhat Sisyphean in nature. But farm the rock they did, burning and clearing the land and planting coconuts, citrus, pineapple, and melons in the ashy interstices between the coral. They homesteaded on the Atlantic, and transportation between the scattered houses was by shallow-draft boat. These boats also took the produce out to deeper waters, where it was off-loaded onto schooners which sailed to Key West as well as to northern ports. In 1905 Henry Flagler, a former partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil and president of the Florida East Coast Railroad, began extending the train track from Homestead, through the Everglades, to Key Largo. Flagler was always pushing southward, legend has it, because his wives were forever wanting to be warmer. (Flagler had three wives. The middle one, Ida Alice, went mad after finding too much solace in her Ouija board. The planchette kept telling her she was destined to marry the czar of Russia. The strict divorce laws of Florida were changed for Flagler. Sailing through the legislature and signed by the governor in a swift two and a half weeks, a new provision made incurable insanity grounds for divorce. Flagler disposed of Ida Alice and quickly wed a bubbly lady named Mary Lily who liked bourbon and laudanum but avoided the Ouija board.) Other railroad tycoons thought Flagler's interest in Florida absurd, considering it a worthless country, save for its climate. Flagler had the great field of Florida to himself. He pushed down from St. Augustine to Palm Beach, and then to Miami (then known as Fort Dallas), but shipping out from that point was limited by the 12-foot depth of Biscayne Bay. Key West, with its fine deepwater port, was the perfect terminus for the Florida EastWilliams, Joy is the author of 'Florida Keys A History & Guide', published 2003 under ISBN 9780812968422 and ISBN 0812968425.