The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers

John Viele, “The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers” The Pineapple Press, 1996, 145 pp.

The author is a retired naval officer and a former submarine commander who lived on Cudjoe Key in 1996 when he wrote this book.  A book probably only of interest to a Florida resident.  

The author, using old newspapers, letters, diaries, and government records, as well as interviews with old-timer natives of the Keys, put this together.   He also provided me with a list of books I may want to read about Florida.

Air conditioning, screens, electricity and automobiles has now made the Keys habitable to others than the original pioneers.  Now tourism is pretty much the only business.  But this book is about the era before modern conveniences.

-- As recently as 80 years ago, fewer than 300 Keys inhabitants tried to eke out a living without electricity, running water, radios, or telephones

-- Keys pioneers' occupations included salvaging wrecks, growing sponges, planting pineapples, making charcoal, and skinning sharks

My Notes:

Pg. 33:  The Seminole Indians were enraged by the government’s January 1836 deadline for their removal to western reservations.  So they struck back.  On December 28, 1835, in central Florida they ambushed a column of soldiers, killing all but three of the 111 men.  On the same day, at Fort King, near present-day Ocala, Osceola killed the Seminole agent.  The Second Seminole War, the longest and bloodiest of the three, had begun.

Pg. 99:  The isolated way of life of the Florida Keys pioneers neared an end when, in 1905, construction of the Overseas Railroad began.  Seven years later, on January 22, 1912, the first train from the mainland rolled into Key West.  (The population of the rural Keys was about 450 in 1900).

Pg. 131:  On January 25, 1928, the first Overseas Highway was dedicated.  Now the Keys had a railroad and a road for trucks and autos.  Initially, there was a forty-mile gap in the Overseas Highway between No Name Key and Lower Matecumbe Key.  Three ferries shuttled cars across the gap.  However, overshadowing all other events in the Keys in the 1920s and 1930s was the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, one of the most powerful storms to strike the US in modern times.  The eye of the storm, with winds of 200-plus miles per hour, passed over the Matecumbe keys.  What the winds did not destroy, fifteen-foot-high walls of water, racing across the islands, swept away.  When it was over, more than 400 were dead.  Most of them were WWI veterans employed by the WPA to build highway bridges and housed in tents and temporary barracks on Lower Matecumbe.  (In 1935, before the hurricane, the rural Keys population had reached approximately 900.  They did not reach that figure again until after the beginning of WWII; the number reached 40,000 in 1996).