The move from the Hermitage to the Blessed Isle began. As she always had to have chickens, Fred put up a fowl house with wire netting to keep out the wildlife that loved nothing better than fresh chicken and eggs. Birdie began to pack their belongings at the Hermitage, and it was not without bittersweet feelings: “The Hermitage had been so completely our home—so really our own creation, evolved from wildest nature, that it was harder to give up than was any other we had ever left. We had found it an unbroken forest, tied together with wild vines and undergrowth, and we had made it a home blest with a charm of real comfort and beauty.”
Fred secured a sloop and hired a few men to help pack their possessions and take the wagon down to the water so their things could be loaded aboard the sloop. Even though the Blessed Isle was about two miles south, there were no roads or trails to take. Last to be packed up were the two cats, which would have scampered into hiding at the sight of strangers. All was loaded on the wagon, and it began its way down the hill, chickens clucking and cats crying out of fear. Birdie walked behind, carrying her most prized possession: a Greek goddess statue she named “Meditation.” By twilight, they had reached the sloop, and it was loaded with all the goods, while the cats and fowl had to be towed behind the sloop in a small skiff. As darkness fell, the strong south wind caused them to tack back and forth along the sound for the two-mile ride southward.
As they approached the Blessed Isle, the skipper realized that the low tide and strong winds would not allow the heavily laden craft to dock safely at the wharf. Instead, they anchored the sloop near the channel, got aboard the skiff with cats and chickens and rowed to the Blessed Isle. The cats were freed from their crate and quickly scampered into the underbrush. The men retrieved the food basket, a kerosene stove and a few bedding items from the sloop, as it was nearing midnight. Birdie put together a quick stew for the cold and hungry men.
At daybreak, the men brought the rest of the possessions ashore, and all had gone well. Last to be offloaded were her books; being the heaviest, they had been loaded on the sloop’s bottom. The books were loaded on the skiff, and it was making its way toward the wharf when the unthinkable happened: a wave overturned the skiff. “My heart seemed to turn with it, as I saw the boxes of books spill into the waves, sink, then bob up around the boat,” she wrote. Books were her most prized possessions, some of which “we wouldn’t take a farm for.” The books were quickly retrieved and unpacked, left to dry in the sun and dry sand, but the damage had been done: “Their bloated, discolored appearance is still a constant reminder of our difficult and adventurous move to The Blessed Isle.”
The Blessed Isle’s location finally allowed the connections to civilization that Birdie needed. Even with Fred absent, she could take her work under the pine and oak trees near the house and see boats passing by, waving to the passengers. Fred could also just dock the skiff or sailboat and be home without the long trek that he had at the Hermitage. The two cats and Birdie settled into this new home, and were a wonderful greeting party for Fred each day as he docked on his return from work in Palm Beach.
TROPICAL SUN MASTHEAD. Guy Metcalf founded and published the Tropical Sun, the area’s first newspaper. Originally published in Juno, the newspaper moved its offices to West Palm Beach in 1895. Birdie Dewey wrote articles as a correspondent for the Tropical Sun. Private collection.
Development was beginning to take hold in the fledging community. The first newspaper, the Tropical Sun, was published at the small settlement of Juno (at Lake Worth’s northern end), located at the terminus of the Celestial Railroad that ran the 7.5 miles between Jupiter and Juno. The paper published its inaugural issue in March 1891, and Birdie became the first newspaper columnist in South Florida. Her column “The Sitting Room,” written under Birdie’s pen name “Aunt Judith,” featured an advice section, household tips, recipes and original fiction and poems. Ruby Andrews Myers also contributed to the column. Birdie wrote the column until September 1891, and Myers continued it until 1892.
The house that stood on the property needed its own name, too. Most of the homes in the emerging Palm Beach had names, so the Dewey home would be no different. She stated, “There was a small new house so constructed so that additional rooms might easily be added.” It is not known how large that original house was, but what would become the Dewey house was a large two-story wooden structure. An article from the September 30, 1891 Tropical Sun mentioned that Fred was receiving a large load of lumber so that he could “add quite largely to his house.” If the estate was the Blessed Isle, what were they to call the house? This time, they chose an Italian expression popular at the time as the house’s moniker. The Italian expression is Se non è vero, è ben trovato, which means, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “Even if it is not true, it is well conceived.” So, “ben trovato” became an expression of the Victorian era meaning “well invented,” and the house was named Ben Trovato, the first of three Dewey houses to carry the name. The renovations continued into 1892, with the Tropical Sun reporting that “Mr. Dewey is making quite extensive improvements at Ben Trovato, adding quite largely to his house, and painting and furnishing the part built last season.”
The three known pictures of Ben Trovato taken at the time the Deweys owned it show a striking house that combined several architectural styles of the day, including elements of lake style, shingle style and even some Victorian/Queen Anne elements with the octagonal feature that was most likely added in 1891–92. In an interview, Roger Cope, an architect familiar with early Florida homes, stated that the house could be classified as “Federal” style with tropical elements. He surmised that the octagonal feature housed a formal sitting room on the first floor and a master bedroom on the second. The only photographs of the house’s interior are a few in the book The Blessed Isle of the porches that were located on the west side of the house. Interviews conducted in 2012 with two people who were in the house long after the Deweys owned it both spoke of its magnificent spiral staircase.
About this time, Fred became a political leader in the community, holding several different positions. In April 1889, he was appointed county commissioner for Palm Beach by the Florida Senate, and in 1890, he was elected Dade County tax assessor and appointed tax collector. It is important to note that today’s Miami-Dade County is much smaller geographically than Dade County was in the 1890s. Formed in 1836, Dade County stretched from Bahia Honda Key north to the St. Lucie River, about the size of the state of Massachusetts. Today’s Palm Beach County was carved out of the northern end of Dade County in 1909. The county seat had been located in many towns, and in 1888, Dade County residents voted to move the county seat from Miami to Juno, at Lake Worth’s northern end. At Juno, workers constructed a courthouse and jail, and publisher Guy Metcalf moved his Indian River newspaper to Juno and renamed it the Tropical Sun. There was no easy way to reach faraway Miami other than by sailing or walking the beach, something that took several days.
Being tax assessor and collector meant that Fred had to visit every household in Dade County, figure the land’s worth and what the tax assessment would be and then actually collect the monies. Birdie wrote, “In a spacious country, where there is not one single mile of road and no steamboats, this is far from being an easy task, and the time consumed made it a real hardship.” When Fred was between tax assessing and collecting trips, Fred and Birdie worked together on the massive tax books. In that era of no computers or calculators, the only technology to which they had access was an “adder,” a clockwork mechanism that could be used to add single columns of figures. “As we neared the end of making the set of tax-books, we were both full of eager thrills to see if they would come out even.” Once the tax book was finished, two copies had to be made by hand. The authors searched for a copy of the tax book, but all three copies have been lost to time.
BEN TROVATO FROM THE WHARF. The front of Ben Trovato faced Lake Worth. Nestled in the pine woods, the two-story house featured a unique octagonal room on the north e
nd. Courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
The 1890 tax collecting trip was uniquely recorded and documented because several passengers had agreed to accompany Fred on his tax collection route. The events were eloquently captured by Emma Gilpin, the wife of commodities trader John R. Gilpin. From Pennsylvania, the Gilpins explored many parts of Florida and finally found the paradise they sought in Palm Beach. Emma Gilpin was a gifted writer and kept journals and wrote beautiful letters to relatives back home. These treasures of South Florida history were saved by family members and donated to History Miami Museum and the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
Fred arranged for George Potter’s sloop the Heron for the trip. George served as captain and Ben Potter as first mate, and the expedition included Fred, the Gilpins (with son Vincent) and Elizabeth Marsh, described as “an energetic lady from Chicago.” Marsh’s role on the trip differs in the Gilpin account of the events and what Birdie recorded. Birdie knew that the trip would take a month or more, so she had arranged to have “a spinster of mature age” to stay with her, and this woman was to come over on the Heron. That spinster was undoubtedly Marsh, who was a “Miss” in the Gilpin account, and an older woman. Birdie wrote, “At the last minute this lady caught the enthusiasm of the cruisers and instead of having her ‘big box, little box and band-box’ handed out on the wharf of The Blessed Isle, she commanded that they be left in the boat’s cabin, where she decided to stay and join the cruising party.” Birdie stated that the other passengers were somewhat dismayed by having another on board in such cramped quarters; she quoted Fred as being “floored.” In the Gilpin account, Emma stated that Marsh had planned the trip. Which one is accurate cannot be determined. The Heron measured thirty-eight feet long and had a fifteen-foot cabin. There were no “facilities” on board, so the friendly group of seven became very familiar with one another.
The Heron struggled to get out of the inlet, running aground a few times. Finally at sea, they had a restless night on the rough seas. Fred caught some kingfish, which Ben Potter cooked on a kerosene stove. With coffee, the group enjoyed an expedition breakfast, but the rough seas did not let the food stay down long. In ten hours, with a strong northeast breeze, they had reached Biscayne Bay and sailed to Lemon City, which at that time was much larger and more important than Miami, the sleepy town to the south. Along the way, the expedition party met Commodore Ralph Middleton Munroe, a New York yacht builder who had founded Cocoanut Grove near Miami. The Gilpins developed a lifelong friendship with Munroe, and Vincent Gilpin wrote the commodore’s biography in the 1930s.
With no one to stay with her, Birdie was once again on her own for an extended period of time: “I should be left entirely to the society of feathered creatures and the two cats.” Birdie decided to keep a diary when Fred was gone, and she wrote each night in the book. She proudly handed it to Fred when he returned, and he laughed at it, saying it was “four-fifths fed the cats and chickens”; she reminded him, though, that “happy is the country that has no history,” making him realize that such tame events were good.
Birdie’s most immediate neighbor was someone she called the “old German Professor.” She does not identify him by name, but land records revealed that Franz Kinzell, an Austrian doctor who had served in the Civil War, had a lot immediately to the south of the Dewey place. At that time, Kinzell was only using the property to grow plants that interested him; he rowed over each day from the Cocoanut Grove House Hotel and tended his property. He brought the mail over to Birdie and purchased needed provisions for her. Kinzell was a widower, but he remarried in 1892 to none other than Elizabeth Marsh, who had accompanied the Heron party on the tax collecting trip.
THE HERON. John R. Gilpin purchased the Heron sailboat from George Potter. The Gilpins sailed with Fred Dewey aboard the Heron on his 1890 tax collecting trip through Dade County. In this picture, the Gilpin party was headed to Ben Trovato, the Dewey homestead, for an afternoon tea given in honor of the new pastor, Reverend Harding. Courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
By this time, Birdie had also befriended the Seminole Indians, who often stopped by to sell venison or other game. Many times, she provided them with a meal and reveled at the amount that some of them could eat. She noticed that they ate the sweet things first, then the meats and vegetables and then finally the bread: “They thought it impolite to leave a crumb; but always, like Jack Sprat and his wife, ‘licked the plate clean.’”
Once, when Birdie was buying some venison, she went to her purse and realized that Fred had taken her change, leaving her no money to pay. She said to the Seminole, “Take it back. No money.” The Indian replied that she could give him “talk-paper,” essentially an IOU that the storekeeper could cash for Birdie. She also related how the Indians traded in the local store: “Each article was paid for as soon as selected, the attendant being obliged to make change for each separate purchase. One striking trait of the Seminole family is the rule of the petticoat. The men make no bargain without consulting Madam Indian and what she says is final. That is quite refreshing when one considers the abject position of the Western squaw.”
The tax collecting trip aboard the Heron continued, with the group having interesting encounters with the Seminole Indians, touring pineapple fields and “coontie” mills. The native coontie plant, or Florida Arrowroot, grew under the pine trees on the vast forests and produced a fine white starch that was much valued for cooking; it was one of the few ways to make a living in the Miami wilderness. The final stop was to be the old lighthouse at Cape Florida, but warnings of a coming storm forced the group northward to Biscayne Bay. They went out to sea, hoping to beat the storm back to Lake Worth, but the steady northeast winds slowed their progress. Finally the rain hit, and water poured into the cabin. They could fight it no more, so they turned back. They were looking for the House of Refuge’s torches at Fort Lauderdale, their signal that they had reached the New River at Fort Lauderdale (a House of Refuge was a government-run house where stranded or shipwrecked persons were given food and shelter). Instead of the Fort Lauderdale House of Refuge, they realized that they had seen the House of Refuge much farther north in what would become Delray Beach. They had made it as far north as Lake Worth but had not realized it until they turned back south. Eventually, they sailed into the New River at Fort Lauderdale and found a spot where they rested after their ordeal at sea. They waited out the storm there, hoping for a break that would allow them to go northward again. Fred found the remnants of an old stove, and they had a decent dinner on the beach. They remained marooned on the New River for several days, and the men had to obtain provisions at the House of Refuge.
The same weather system wreaked havoc at the Blessed Isle: “For three days kits and I were completely cut off from the rest of the world by heavy wind-squalls with pelting rains.” During these frequent cloud-bursts, Birdie tried desperately to save her chickens and their little chicks. Each time she ventured out, she was soaked from head to toe in her long dresses. Then an idea struck: “I got out my bathing suit and so garbed, with its long woolen stockings and a pair of India-rubber sandals, I was ready for unlimited prowls in the rain. It was like having wings, to be rid of the damp, flapping skirts and I told the kits I could understand just how they felt in their close-fitting suits.”
Birdie’s loneliness during Fred’s absence was difficult in a house as large as Ben Trovato. She was “hungry for music,” and there was not yet a piano as they had in other homes. Being ever resourceful, she created her own instrument, essentially a kazoo, by wrapping thin tissue paper around a comb: “I went out and sat down on the steps of the front porch to give a concert of one for an audience of two. The cats sat blinking up at me with exactly the bored expressions one sees on the faces of drawing-room victims at an amateur performance.” A piano did not grace Ben Trovato until 1892, and the Tropical Sun announced that a “fine new piano has been delivered at Ben Trovato, the home of F.S. Dewey. The instrument was purchased in Jacks
onville and is an exceptionally sweet toned one.”
BYRD SPILMAN DEWEY AND CATS. At the Blessed Isle, the Deweys enjoyed the company of Birdie’s beloved cats, which became the subjects of her second book, The Blessed Isle and Its Happy Families. Courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
The Heron party again tried to make a run for Lake Worth, but the strong breakers and severe seasickness had them once again returning to the New River. They had to wait another five days to finally get back to Lake Worth. Emma Gilpin wrote, “Captain [George] Potter blows a blast on his conch shell, and immediately we get a response of his brightening light, and soon after a blow from his horn, and a whine from his dog.” They knew they were back in Lake Worth. Birdie wrote that Fred seemed to be the only adventurer glad to be back: “To the others all the delays with their endless adventures, only added to the romance of the trip.” The Gilpins were to become lifelong friends of the Deweys, and the Deweys are mentioned frequently in Gilpin correspondence.
Fred served his last year as tax collector and assessor in 1892, and on this last traverse of Dade County as an official, Birdie accompanied him on the five-week trip. This time, they engaged U.D. Hendrickson’s sharpie sailboat for the trip. The Tropical Sun reported, “The sharpie sent a blast from the conch shell over the water at 8:30 in the evening and an exchange of rifle signals was fired. Mrs. Dewey’s first ‘outside’ trip had the most happy attendant circumstances.” The trip to Biscayne Bay was smooth, and she reported to the Tropical Sun that the trip down was “absolutely perfect—less rough than ordinary sailings. No one was seasick.” The newspaper reporter lamented that there was “no crimson glow from Ben Trovato” with the absence of the Deweys.
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