Great Britain’s rule in Florida lasted only two decades and as far as South Florida was concerned, it was a non-event. Britain divided Florida in two separate colonies with West Florida ruled from Pensacola and East Florida administered from St. Augustine. They did manage to attract more settlers to these parts with newly designed land grant schemes but South Florida was mostly beyond their horizon. British rule came to an abrupt end with the American War of Independence. Ironically, since Spain had sided with the patriots against the British, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the war, stipulated that Florida return to Spanish hands.
The second Spanish period witnessed sustained arrivals into northern Florida of British colonists, Native Americans, and former black slaves who were seeking economic opportunity or refuge from the newly formed United States. The Spanish referred to the Creek Indians as cimmarones (renegades), which later became “Seminoles.” Spanish rule was weak: English colonists in western Florida proclaimed allegiance to the British Crown, and Seminoles supported the Creek wars with the United States across the border in Georgia. Incursions of U.S. troops into northern Florida culminated in the First Seminole War of 1817, and Spain was effectively reduced to the role of spectator. By 1821, the United States and Spain agreed to a deal in which the United States acquired Florida by renouncing any claims to Texas. With Florida’s accession to the United States, the Seminoles spread out into the central and southern parts of the state, with U.S. troops on their heels.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, tension between the U.S. government and Native Americans in Florida continued to build. Seminole defiance of U.S. reservation policies led to the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842, which took place mostly in central Florida. It was a bloody conflict that took the lives of fifteen hundred U.S. troops (as a result of disease, mainly) and many more Native Americans—nobody bothered to keep track. One of the earliest victims on the U.S. side was Virginia-born Major Francis Dade, killed with his entire company by Seminoles in 1835 on a campaign near Ocala, an event that became known as the Dade Massacre. Dade County was named after him in 1836, even though he probably never set foot near Biscayne Bay. When it was first created, Dade County was much bigger than now and included present-day Broward and Palm Beach counties.
As time went on, the war spread southward and reached the area around Biscayne Bay. There were a small number of white settlers who would sometimes seek refuge in Key West, which had grown into a respectable town where many made a living as ship wreckers. One of the main incidents in newly founded Dade County involved the lighthouse at Cape Florida, at the southern tip of Key Biscayne just across the bay from Miami. The lighthouse was built by the U.S. government in 1825 to bring an end to the large number of shipwrecks caused by the reefs (the government constructed the first lighthouse in Key West as well, at the same time). In 1836, Seminoles protesting harassment by U.S. troops attacked the Cape Florida lighthouse and set it on fire. The lighthouse keeper made it out alive and joined his family in Key West, but his assistant was killed. The lighthouse was rebuilt in 1855 and is still there, the earliest modern landmark of Greater Miami.
During and after the Seminole wars some groups of Native Americans moved into South Florida, and some settled in the less accessible Everglades to be safe from U.S. troops. One of these groups was the Miccosukee. They were closely associated with Seminoles but maintained a distinct language and identity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, they have carved out an existence on the tiny islands in the Everglades, living off fish, duck, deer, and small crops and getting around by canoe. Their exact whereabouts were not documented until the introduction of airboats after World War II. It took until 1962 for the Miccosukee to be officially recognized by the State of Florida, and to acquire sovereign nation status within the United States. When discovered, they were the only surviving Native American tribe of the Great Creek Confederacy east of the Mississippi River. With a population count of about 550, they are presently the longest continuous population group of Greater Miami.
For white North American and European settlers, South Florida was hardly an appealing place during the Seminole wars. The official population of Dade County actually declined between 1840 and 1860, from 446 to 83 persons. Most whites in Dade County at this time were soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas, the military post established in 1836 on the north bank of the Miami River, near present day Lummus Park. Fort Dallas was not a real fort but merely a collection of barracks built on land owned by Richard Fitzpatrick, who was born in South Carolina but lived in Key West. He owned about two thousand acres and tried to operate a plantation, but business was not good. In 1842, he sold the property to his nephew, William English, and he moved to Texas. It was William English who platted the “Village of Miami,” but people kept referring to the area around the bay as “Fort Dallas.” About ten years later English, too, packed his bags. He sold the property in different parcels and joined Fitzpatrick to try his luck in the California gold rush. Fort Dallas continued as a military post through the Civil War and was then abandoned.
Figure 1. The Florida lighthouse, undated photograph. Originally built in 1825 and reconstructed in 1855. State Archives of Florida.
South Florida was one of the most remote, inaccessible, and “empty” parts of the country. In much of the rest of the nation, and many parts of the world, the Industrial Revolution, hand in hand with urbanization, was transforming human society. In 1880, a number of major cities had formed in the United States, along with many smaller ones. The New York urban region, the largest of all, had almost reached a population of 2 million. Philadelphia was approaching 1 million and Chicago half a million. Cities like Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis each housed over 300,000 people. San Francisco, all the way on America’s West Coast, had almost a quarter of a million. The main cities nearest to Miami were in Georgia: Atlanta and Savannah each had over 30,000 inhabitants. In that same year, 1880, the entire area of Dade County had an official count of 257 persons.3
The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a growing number of farmers and homesteaders as well as the arrival of some enterprising individuals whose investment in the area proved crucial to its future development. What is interesting about Miami’s beginnings is not just that it happened so late, but that so many key players were established outsiders who came and went, without planting any roots. Foremost among these early pioneers were Julia Tuttle and Henry Flagler.
Tuttle, a widow from Cleveland, Ohio, arrived with her two children in 1891, at the age of fifty-one. She had inherited some 40 acres of land north of the Miami River from her father and she used the money from her deceased husband’s business to purchase another 640 acres of orange groves along the northern banks of the river. This land included the old Fort Dallas and she had one of the main buildings converted into a home. That building has survived to this day and sits in present-day Lummus Park in downtown Miami.
Figure 2. Southeast Florida, covered by the Everglades, 1893. © Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida.
Tuttle seemed to be on a mission to turn Miami’s wilderness into a real town and she realized this required better connections to the rest of the country. Her most important contribution was to persuade Henry Flagler to extend his railways down south. Her idealism must have exceeded her business instincts, and the opposite was probably true for Flagler. Tuttle lived in Miami for only nine years and when she died, on September 14, 1898, she left a considerable debt as a result of her land grants to Flagler. Her son and daughter, who were already in their twenties when they migrated with their mother to Miami, did not share her enthusiasm for South Florida’s frontier. They sold the rest of the land to pay off the debts. One moved to New York, the other to Cleveland. Julia Tuttle was one of the first people interred in the City of Miami Cemetery.
Henry