CLEMATIS STREET. Clematis Street was the heart of West Palm Beach’s first shopping area. Stores first opened in tents in 1894, and today the street still thrives with shops and restaurants. Courtesy Florida Archives.
UNION CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. Fred Dewey served as the secretary and treasurer of the Union Congregational Church in West Palm Beach. The church, originally located on Datura Street, still exists today in another location. Private collection.
FLAGLER’S WHITEHALL MANSION. Whitehall, Henry Flagler’s Beaux Arts masterpiece, has fifty-five rooms. Today, the mansion serves as the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Did Birdie worry that the hotel and the tourists would ruin their paradise? No. The Hotel Royal Poinciana brought the culture and ambience that she loved and longed for. Upon attending a concert at the hotel, she remarked, “Only Fred and I, of all present, with souls receptive and attuned to beauty and charm; and with memories of life’s real hardships endured and conquered in our pioneering, could enjoy to the full these golden moments in Fairyland which was a dream come true. In our isolation so remote and wild—so denuded of all the luxuries of life’s centers—the world had come to us, just as we dreamed it would, bringing everything we lacked and completing what Nature had so perfectly begun.”
In From Pine Woods to Palm Groves, she never refers to Flagler by name, rather referring to him as the “King”: “The coming of the King and Queen of Fairyland and all that their coming meant, had completed the enchantment of our far-away tropical paradise, where the opaline wavelets of its inland sea swing ever to and fro between the palm-fringed shores of Fairyland and The Blessed Isle.”
The Great Freeze and the Orphaned Town
As 1894 was drawing to a close, the October 11 Tropical Sun reported that the Deweys “intend on spending the winter at Orlando, where they have leased a house.” Birdie wrote, “We had closed the house on our Blessed Isle, and had gone to pass that winter in a little city much further north, up in central Florida; because Fred said he was beginning to hunger for what he called ‘A little smell of winter.’ He got it.” The winter of 1894–95 was one for the history books, and the Deweys were headed right for the “Great Freeze” and its epicenter in Orlando.
They settled into the little cottage and decorated it with books and trinkets to make it feel like home. They were preparing for Christmas, and a surprise present found its way to them: “On the evening of the twenty-second it was just chilly enough to give us the always-wished-for excuse for a little blaze in the hearth.” That evening, they heard a small tapping at the door, and a dirty, skinny kitten appeared. Soon the kitten was in the house, lapping at milk, ready to be cleaned up and adopted. For the first time, Fred requested to name a cat, and the white kitten was christened Peter—Peter the Tramp. Birdie wrote this story for the Animal Protective League of New York at the request of Mrs. Myles Standish, the organization’s founder, for a fundraising effort.
Peter had a new home and was the one and only “retriever” cat that the Deweys owned—he played fetch much like a dog. Then, on December 29, 1894, the freeze hit. “At last, one morning, we awoke to find our water pipes all frozen, and ourselves chilled to the bone.” A neighbor stopped by and said it had been the coldest night that anyone could ever remember; the mercury dipped to eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in Orlando and twenty-four degrees in West Palm Beach. This freeze caused the hanging citrus fruit to drop, but did not kill the trees. “That morning we finished breakfast with a dessert of orange-ice fresh from the trees. Cut open, and eaten out with a spoon, the frozen oranges made a dish fit for the gods.”
January proved to be a relatively warm and wet month, and the orange trees sprouted new shoots as the branches filled with moisture and sap. Then, on February 9, 1895, the second freeze hit, just as cold as the first, but this one proved deadly for the trees. Most of the Central Florida orange groves were killed—frozen solid to the point that trees actually split and turned black from the excessive moisture and the new growth on the trees. “All of our neighbors had orange groves from which came their livelihood. In one night they changed from a condition of comparative wealth to the pinch of poverty,” Birdie wrote. That year orange production in Florida plummeted from 6 million boxes to just 100,000. Many abandoned their groves and left the state; others realized that Florida needed to diversify its agriculture so that one event could not devastate its entire economy. The Deweys had enough of the cold. Fred remarked, “I tell you what let’s do, Birdie: we’d better give up this cottage and fly back to our nest in the tropics.” A neighbor adopted the kitten Peter the Tramp, and the Deweys headed back to the Blessed Isle.
The freeze’s damage had reached West Palm Beach, where the coconut palms and other tropical foliage and fruits had suffered greatly. Down south in Miami, however, the damage had not been great. Julia Tuttle, a Miami pioneer and landholder, had urged Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Miami so that prosperity and opportunity could extend southward. To convince him of the “frost-proof” nature of south Dade County, Tuttle sent him fresh orange blossoms that remained untouched by the freeze. Flagler did decide to extend his railroad southward, and Miami was the next area to be touched by the Flagler magic.
The Deweys were about to work some magic of their own, in a bit of a twisted tale on how they got caught up in the founding of one of Palm Beach County’s largest cities. As mentioned previously, in 1892 Birdie purchased 160 acres of land at the foot of Lake Worth, in an area that was simply referred to as the “Hypoluxo Garden Lands.” Lake Worth’s west side had extremely fertile muck land, and at that time, it was considered to be the best farmland in the county, as the Everglades were still very much under water. The muck lands were well suited for tomatoes, and the coming of the railroad meant that farmers could load their crates for fast shipment to northern markets.
New settlers and speculators were also making their way south. Among them were two prominent Michigan men, William Seelye Linton and Nathan Smith Boynton. How the two men became acquainted is unknown. Linton had served in several political offices including the House of Representatives, and he even ran for president of the United States in 1896. Boynton was a Civil War major, had owned a Michigan newspaper and had served in many public offices in Port Huron, Michigan. He founded the Knights of the Maccabees in 1878, a fraternal organization that at its peak had more than 200,000 members. Both men ended up in South Florida in 1895, seeking a warmer climate and land.
Linton bought land along the oceanfront from Stephen Andrews on the barrier island where the town of Ocean Ridge is today. Andrews was the House of Refuge keeper at what became Delray Beach; in 1881, he had bought the eighty oceanfront acres from the State of Florida for ninety cents per acre. Linton sold the oceanfront land to Boynton, who started building one of the first homes to be located directly on the ocean, on a twenty-foot-high bluff where the Gulf Stream comes very close to shore. The common belief of how the associated town of Boynton was founded was that Major Boynton owned all the land in the area and had founded the town as well as the hotel.
Directly west of the oceanfront land along the west side of the barrier island, a swamp between the peninsula and barrier island was being dredged and widened to form the Florida East Coast Canal (today’s Intracoastal Waterway), which created a canal for commerce and development. The land on the west side of the canal was still owned by Birdie. Linton offered her a deal for the land she could not refuse. She sold 120 of her 160 acres under a contract where Linton would pay her $6,000 for the land, plus 8 percent interest, to be paid over a four-year period. This was a huge profit. The agreement allowed Linton to subdivide the land into lots or farm plots. The Deweys kept 40 acres located along the canal. Linton kept buying land in the vicinity with small down payments, and soon he had platted a town about seven miles south of the Dewey land that he named the town of Linton.
As Boynton was building his home on the beach, he expanded his original plan and decided to build a hote
l, which became the Boynton Hotel. He was inspired by Henry Flagler opening a second hotel in Palm Beach, which was built east of the Hotel Royal Poinciana and eventually named The Breakers for its location within earshot of the breaking waves. Boynton’s new hotel provided jobs for local settlers and put the area on the map, as the hotel gained a fine reputation for its ocean bathing and excellent meals prepared with locally grown produce.
THE BOYNTON HOTEL. Major Nathan S. Boynton built his fifty-room hotel on the ocean beach. The hotel, well known for its fine dining utilizing produce raised on nearby farms, was opened in 1897. Private collection.
Linton sold lots and farm plots from the former Dewey land to new settlers, many from Michigan and Illinois, who had helped build Boynton’s hotel and decided to stay and farm. The area was informally called “Boynton” as the hotel was the best-known landmark. The settlers planted tomatoes and other crops along the canal and planted pineapple in the sandy soils farther inland. According to Horace B. Murray, an early settler who supervised construction of Major Boynton’s hotel, Franklin Sheen and George O. Butler surveyed the town. Neither Boynton nor Linton ever filed a plat for the town of Boynton, probably because they had no deed for the land, merely a contract for purchase.
But Linton’s plans and schemes soon began to unravel. Most of his “purchases” were done with little or no cash; in the case of buying the Dewey land, he had only paid $100 up front as stated in the contract. To the south, too, in the town named after him, things were going bad as Linton was unable to pay for the lands he had bought. This left the settlers who had moved to the two towns in a real dilemma—they had been sold land by Linton to which he did not have title and he had given them worthless deeds. Settlers had already built homes and planted crops on the lands. Linton’s townspeople were so disillusioned that they changed the name of the town from Linton to the town of Delray in 1898, and the city is known today as Delray Beach.
BOYNTON, FLORIDA. The Deweys’ second Ben Trovato home, in Boynton, Florida, was their planned retirement home. The Deweys did much for the town’s welfare, including donating lots to pay for street paving and starting a free library in the post office. Courtesy Florida Archives.
BOYNTON PLAT DETAIL. A excerpt from the plat for the town of Boynton, filed by Fred and Birdie Dewey on September 29, 1898. Courtesy Palm Beach County Planning and Zoning.
These circumstances also left the area known as the town of Boynton in turmoil. Here, too, Linton had sold lots and farming tracts to settlers. Linton sold forty acres of the land to Boynton on March 5, 1897, which constituted the town area, but the sale did not mean much as Linton had no deed on the land. Boynton formed the Southern Florida Land Company and sold town lots for fifty dollars. Boynton began to realize that his late effort to save the town was not going to work. Boynton wrote to James E. Ingraham, Flagler’s vice-president for the Florida East Coast Railway land department, in a March 31, 1897 letter: “I had a conference with Roberts, Dimick and Dewey and was unable to get any concessions worth considering hence I think I will have to abandon all further efforts to get matters in shape then.”
After Linton stopped his payments, the Deweys filed a foreclosure lawsuit on September 15, 1897, against Linton and Boynton for nonpayment. The Deweys settled the case on October 29, 1897, with them regaining all their land from Linton and Boynton. From the settlement document: “N.S. Boynton will release and assign on his own behalf all the right, title and interest that he has obtained in said so-called Dewey contract by virtue of said assignment of W.S. Linton.” For their part of the agreement, the Deweys released Boynton from any liability under the Dewey contract and noted that they would file the town plat.
The Indian River Advocate reported on December 10, 1897, that “defendants [were] surrendering their entire interests, and Mr. Dewey [was] regaining possession of his land, on which is located the town of Boynton. He will now proceed to deal directly with the settlers.” Through these turn of events, Fred also gained a new position, serving as land agent for several interests, including the Florida East Coast Railway. “For two long years of uncertainty, the settlers in these two towns have held on to their bits of lands, waiting for the time to come when the titles would be in shape so that deeds could be made to them,” the Indian River Advocate reported.
Linton, who was never a resident of the state of Florida, had orphaned the little town of Boynton; Fred and Birdie now adopted it and helped the fledging community grow and prosper. On September 26, 1898, the Deweys filed plats for the town of Boynton and for Dewey’s Subdivision. The Deweys had every right to call their town anything they wanted, including “Deweyville.” But they were friends with Major Boynton, a fellow veteran of the Civil War, and decided to name the town in his honor, a city that is known today as Boynton Beach, with more than sixty-eight thousand residents, making it the third-largest city in Palm Beach County.
In their past land dealings, the Deweys had essentially been speculators and not developers; now the role of shaping a town was thrust upon them. They embraced this opportunity, with Fred acting as land agent and selling property that Henry Flagler had been granted for building the railroad on through to Miami. The Deweys built a home in Boynton, which they also called Ben Trovato, where Fred stayed while on business in the area or where the Deweys spent weekends. They began selling town lots and farming tracts to the settlers, who were finally able to be issued genuine deeds to their land. These were all the land entry sales records that were found in the tract sales books at the Palm Beach County Courthouse when research for this book was started.
FRED DEWEY IN HIS BOAT. Fred Dewey at the helm of his naphtha launch, which Birdie nicknamed the “Calamity Jane” for the boat’s tendency to break down. Private collection.
Fred bought a naphtha launch motorboat to quicken travel to the Boynton area and all points along Lake Worth. When first purchased, its motor proved quite untrustworthy and left Fred and his passengers stranded in very remote locations. Because of this, Birdie christened the boat the “Calamity Jane.”
At the West Palm Beach Ben Trovato, Birdie entertained visiting family members and kept busy writing articles for publication at the national and local level. Palm Beach’s resident women decided to publish their own literary magazine as a fundraiser for the Royal Poinciana Chapel in Palm Beach. Birdie’s friend Ruby Andrews Myers served as editor, and the women produced the 1896 Lake Worth Historian. Birdie contributed an alluring short story called “A Lake Worth Romance,” a sweet tale of love lost and found again. An excerpt: “This ‘light that never was’ may be freely translated as romance. Practical people often deride it, but by so doing, they only show ignorance of its charm. It is a priceless gift. One who possesses it goes through life keeping step to music unheard by others.”
Her sister-in-law Lillian Spilman, married to brother Lewis Hopkins Spilman, wrote an essay about a summer vacation in Palm Beach, something that most people did not think would be enjoyable, given the heat and mosquitoes. She wrote, “No snobs to worry the genial denizens and natives in summer—only a few mosquitoes—and the naturally hospitable Floridian is a warm, hearty living exponent of best virtue.”
WEST PALM BEACH FREE READING ROOM. Books were an important part of West Palm Beach’s early history. The Free Reading Room, located in a city park on the waterfront, was opened in 1895. Birdie’s books still reside in the Florida Room at the Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach. Courtesy Florida Archives.
Back in Illinois, Birdie’s father, Reverend Jonathan Edwards Spilman, passed away on May 23, 1896, at the age of eighty-four. It is not known for sure if he visited Florida and the Blessed Isle, but Birdie did write of the “Old Dominie” visiting, which is usually how she referred to her father in her writings. Other family members visited, including Birdie’s older sister, Anna Louise Spilman. The March 3, 1898 Tropical Sun reported that Anna Louise was taking over a farm in the town of Boynton: “Miss Spilman will be Boynton’s first lady gardener, and we all wish her the
best of success in her undertaking.” The cottage on the property was renamed Spilman Cottage, and many fine parties were held there. From the September 11, 1898 Tropical Sun: “A most delightful time was experienced by those present, due to the courtesy of F.S. Dewey, a number of terpsichorean [dancing] devotees gathered at Spilman Cottage, where several hours were devoted to the light fantastic.”
Among all these hurried events of developing a town and entertaining family, Birdie was writing her breakthrough book, one that brought her more literary fame than anything else she wrote. This coincided with the new century, and the march of time would soon bring changes that again challenged her heart.
A New Century and New Challenges
The year 1899 was certainly a remarkable one in America, especially in the Dewey household. The new century was at its dawn, and Birdie wrote the following in a New Year’s essay, published in the Maysville Public Ledger: “As the old year dies the new year is born. The hour of passing from old to new is one of vigil—of remembrance—of hope. From a dawn sky, gilded by the sun’s first ray, comes the glad new year—a boat sailing wing-and-wing loaded down to the water’s edge with gifts. It speeds us-wards dashing up the spray with its golden prow, leaving in its wake a ruffled tract of sparkling light.”
For Birdie, she had fulfilled perhaps her greatest personal dream: the publication of her first book. It is not known to how many publishers she had submitted Bruno, but it was published in the fall of 1899 by Little, Brown and Company in Boston, which was founded in 1837 and was one of America’s largest publishing houses. Birdie was in good company with other Little, Brown and Company authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson and Edward Everett Hale.
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