Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ally, this was the same year John S Collins began selling lots out of a 5-mile strip between
the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, or what is now 14th to 67th Sts on Miami Beach (ie most
of the city).
Of Miami's 502 original inhabitants, 100 of them were African American, conscripted
for hard labor and relegated to the northwest neighborhood of Colored Town.
During this period, a frenzy of activity was underway to prepare South Florida for ex-
tensive settlement. In 1900, Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, envisioning an 'Em-
pire of the Everglades,' set in motion a frenzy of canal building. Over the next 70 years,
some 1800 miles of canals and levees were etched across Florida's porous limestone.
These earthworks drained about half the Everglades (about 1.5 million acres) below Lake
Okeechobee, replacing it with farms, cattle ranches, orange groves, sugarcane and suburbs.
Historic Homes
Hemingway House
,
Key West
The First Big Booms
The promise of money and the expansion of Flagler's railway fueled waves of settlement.
Population growth peaked during WWI, when the US military established an aviation
training facility in Miami. Many of the thousands who came to work and train figured,
'Hey, the weather's nice,' and Miami's population shot from 1681 people in 1900 to al-
most 30,000 by 1920. The new Floridians wrote home and got relatives in on the act, and
after the war came the first full-fledged Miami boom (1923-25), when Coconut Grove and
Allapattah were annexed into what was dubbed, for the first time, Greater Miami.
Even then, Miami was built for good times. People wanted to drink and gamble, be-
cause although it was illegal, liquor flowed freely here throughout the entire Prohibition
period.
