The History of Florida

Edited by Michael Gannon “The History of Florida” Univ. Press of Florida, 2013, 526 pp.

The History of Florida, now the nation’s third largest populous state not including the 86 million tourists reported in 2011, is comprised of chapters composed by twenty-five leading historians, assembled by Michael Gannon to create a comprehensive, view of Florida’s history over the past 500 years. 

Michael Gannon is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Florida. He is the author or editor of six books on Florida history.

My Notes:

About 12,000 years ago sea levels were as much as 350 feet lower than at present because of huge amounts of water tied up in Ice Age glaciers.  This exposed a large land bridge between Siberia and Alaska across what is now the Bering Strait.  Hunter-gatherers easily crossed this bridge which connected Asia and North America and was at least as wide as the distance from Orlando to New York City.  These nomads are called Paleoindians, and they entered Florida around 10,000 B.C.  Campsites of the Paleoindians are found across North America from Alaska to south Florida. 

At the time of the Florida Paleoindians, the lowered seas gave Florida a total landmass about twice what it is today.  The Gulf of Mexico shoreline, for instance, was more than 100 miles west of its present location. 

Pg. 16:  When Ponce de Leon sailed the coastline of Florida in 1513, the native population numbered 350,000, including 50,000 Apalachee, 150,000 Timucua speakers, and 150,000 other people in the western Panhandle and central and southern Florida.  But the European presence brought diseases and slaving raids that severely reduced and ultimately destroyed Florida’s original inhabitants.  By the late eighteenth century, they were no more.  (In 1763 fewer than 100 aboriginal Indians remained, living in two villages in the vicinity of St. Augustine chose to depart for Cuba with the Spaniards when the British traded Cuba to the Spanish for Florida in the Treaty of Paris; in 1783 the British again ceded Florida to Spain then in 1822 ceded to the US).

The more populous groups of native tribes of Florida were: The Calusa of the southwest coast, the Timucua-speaking peoples of the central interior, and the Apalachee of the Panhandle.  Seminoles didn’t populate Florida until beginning in 1716 when they (Creeks) were pushed south.  Between 1817 and 1858 there were three Seminole wars with the US which decreased the Seminole population from about 5,000 to fewer than 200.  Chief Bowlegs finally accepted money to go west with four of his subchiefs.  Under the terms, 164 persons shipped out in 1858; Sam Jones, with perhaps 17 warriors, remained hidden on an island deep in the Everglades.  Altogether, the approximate 200 remaining Seminoles preserved the culture and were the basis for a slowly increasing number of inheritors.

Pg. 236:  Florida became the twenty-seventh state in 1845, largely to offset the coming statehood of Iowa as a free state in 1846. 

Pg. 51:  Twentieth-century data suggest that during La Nina years there is a high annual probability (68 percent) of one or more hurricanes striking Florida, defined as the area south of Tampa on the west and all the rest of the peninsula to the east.  The stronger the La Nina, the stronger the probability of a hurricane landfall on the peninsula or on the Gulf coast (especially Texas and Louisiana). 

Pg. 277:  Before the Civil War, Florida had been a Deep South cotton and slave state much like its neighbors Georgia and Alabama.  Most of its population was clustered along the northern border.  In 1877, Florida ranked as the least populous and most thinly settled state east of the Mississippi River, with only about 250,000 residents.  However, over the following forty years Florida would grow at a rate approaching twice the pace of the US. 

Pg. 278:  Hamilton Disston in 1881 made a $1million deal with Florida.  For $1 million in cash, Disston purchased 4 million acres of land outright, and he also gained the option to drain an additional 9 million acres of swampland at his own expense, dividing the drained land equally between himself and the state.  His dredges began digging south from the town of Kissimmee to straighten the Kissimmee River so that it would carry water rapidly into Lake Okeechobee.  At the same time, another crew excavated a canal from the mouth of the Caloosahatchee into Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven so that water from the lake would flow into the Gulf of México. 

Another of Florida’s important developers, Henry Plant, helped to connect Florida with the rest of the country by modernizing the South’s railroads.  Plant developed Florida’s west coast and Henry Flagler concentrated on the East coast where his Florida East Coast Railroad reached Miami in April 1896 and Key West in 1912.  The portion of the railroad to Key West was wiped out by the 1935 hurricane (it is now a roadway for cars completed in 1938).  (The Tamiami Trail was completed in 1927).

Pg. 288:  When the US declared war against Spain following the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, Florida played a large part in the conflict.  Tampa was selected as the primary point of assembly for a US invasion force. 

Pg. 300:  Between 1923 and 1925 an estimated 300,000 additional people settled in Florida.  Even the Bible was utilized by promoters to lure settlers: ‘Arise and go toward the south’ (Acts 8:260; ‘I have bought a piece of ground and I must needs go and see it’ (Luke 14:18); and ‘Search you out a place to pitch your tents in’ (Deuteronomy 1:33).   Then the September 1926 hurricane with winds of 130 to 150 miles per hour killed 400 people, injuring 6,300, and leaving 50,000 homeless.  Many newcomers then abruptly left the state.  In 1928, September brought another hurricane of equal strength and caused Lake Okeechobee to overflow, deluging surrounding communities.  Nearly 2,000 persons drowned.

Note: Most Atlantic hurricanes form north of the equator and move east to west, a good many of them drawn to the shallow warm waters of the Gulf.  Nearly 40 percent of all US hurricanes hit Florida.  Sixty-two did so in the twentieth century.  (p. 359)

Pg. 335:  Of the 372,000 US incarcerated German prisoners of war in WWII, 12,000 spent time in Florida.  Floridians had watched twenty-four US ships sunk off Florida’s coast by U-boats.  Newspapers reported a story of a young nurse wiping tar off a bedraggled merchant mariner, asking him, ‘Is this your first visit to Florida?’

Pg. 358:  The Gulf Stream revolutionized cross-Atlantic travel before the invention of steamships.  The Stream flows up to seventy miles per day. 

Pg. 364:  The St. Johns River in northeast Florida begins in the south Indian River County and flows north 310 miles to its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean at Jacksonville, it is Florida’s longest river, up to three miles wide, it is also the most navigable. 

Pg. 368:  Florida has more deadly lightning strikes than any other state.  Average annual rainfall is between fifty and sixty inches, with south Florida’s portion usually slightly higher.  In wetter years some parts of the state could get up to 100 inches.  Storms often leave several inches of rain in a matter of hours.  Florida has 1,350 miles of coastline.

Before major drainage projects and development booms in the twentieth century, half of Florida’s surface area was covered with freshwater.  To deal with it, the state lobbied for the passage of the 1850 Swamp Land Act, congressional legislation that allowed states to annex and drain federally owned wetlands.  In the end, the act nearly doubled the landmass belonging to the state of Florida. 

Throughout Florida along many of the rivers is a fresh-water spring.  The Suwannee River alone has 200 springs.  Geologists have counted more than 900 in the state.  Thirty-three are first-magnitude springs, meaning each discharges 100 cubic feet or more per second.  The source of this effusiveness is the Floridian Aquifer, one of the world’s most productive artesian systems.  All of Florida and parts of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi sit atop this aquifer. 

Pg. 376:  Red Tides:  aggravated by nutrient overloading from human activity causes the Red Tides: a phenomenon known as an algal bloom (large concentrations of aquatic microorganisms) when it is caused by a few species of dinoflagellates and the bloom takes on a red or brown color.   By 1947 the resulting algal bloom obliterated the sponging industry. 

Note: The debate over the cause of red tides is controversial, they have been reported in the Gulf since the 1700s. Red tides occur naturally off coasts all over the world. Not all red tides have toxins or are harmful.

2014 southwest Florida news reports: ‘The current red tide bloom is around 20 miles off the southwestern coast of Florida, too far away to bother beachgoers, at least for now. But it’s big … really big, stretching 60 miles wide, 90 miles long and at least 100 feet down.  While the red tide appears almost every year, officials have not seen one this size since 2005. So far, the death count is modest: around 1,000 fish and some crabs and octopi, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). But that could change if it moves closer to shore.

Pg. 426:  In 1967, in Swann v. Adams, the US Supreme Court ordered the reapportionment of Florida to reflect ‘one, man, one vote.’  Within months a new legislature was formed that oversaw the modernization of state government, the abandonment of segregation, and the rise of the Republican Party.  The world of the Pork Choppers had collapsed. However, it was not until 2002 that Republicans for the first time in Florida’s history controlled the governorship, all three cabinet posts, 18 of 25 congressional seats, 26 of 40 state Senate seats, and 81 of 120 state House seats with Jeb Bush in charge.

Pg. 437:  In 1985 Governor Graham pushed the far-reaching Florida Growth Management Act through the legislature.  In the act was a ‘concurrency requirement’ that barred private development, unless supporting public facilities (roads, schools, sewers, etc.) were either already in place or were built concurrently with new development.  (This act was significantly altered in 2011 during an economic downturn when it was regarded by the Republican-controlled legislature as halting job growth). 

Pg. 482:  More than 1.1 million Cuban exiles arrived in the US over five decades, most settling in Florida, especially the Miami area.  The Eisenhower administration encouraged the exile migration to destabilize and discredit Castro’s communist regime.  However, Castro largely controlled the timing thus permitting the exodus of dissidents to defuse political opposition or internal economic problems.  Humanitarian considerations had little to do with the Cuban migration on either side.  Miami became a ‘front line in the Cold War.’

Pg. 489:  Mexicans predominate as the largest Hispanic group in the seven rural, agricultural counties in central Florida—Hardee, Hendry, Highlands, Collier, Okeechobee, DeSoto, and Glades after 1990.  Puerto Ricans predominate in the three metro Orland counties—Orange, Osceola, and Seminole.  In 2010, depending on the source, between 720,000 and 825,000 unauthorized immigrants were living and many working, in Florida.  (By the 1980s, Florida had the highest crime rate in the nation, and for a time Miami had an unenviable reputation as the drug and murder capital of the US).

Pg. 504:  A trivia game in Florida asks contestants to name the most ill-conceived, harebrained project in state history.  Choices include the drainage of the Everglades, the planned Jet Port along the Tamiami Trail, the efforts to make Old Tampa Bay a freshwater lake, the straightening of the Kissimmee River, and the Cross State Barge Canal.

Pg. 513:  The opening of Disney World in 1971 created the world’s greatest tourist attraction, and continues to draw more than 17 million tourists annually.  Joining Disney World, is Sea World, Disney’s Epcot, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Universal Studios, all of which lure an additional 50 million visitors annually.  And retirement rivals tourism as a driving force behind Florida’s postwar growth. 

Pg. 523:  In a span of forty-four days in 2004, four powerful hurricanes crisscrossed the state.  (These were hurricanes Charley Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne).  These were not the first hurricanes or even the most expensive to slam Florida.  In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew pummeled south Florida with the force of a Category 5 storm, leaving in its wake 65,000 homes destroyed.  However, this hurricane disaster forced new building codes with hurricane-resistant features.