South Florida has a fascinating history, but it’s the visionaries – those noteworthy developers, entrepreneurs, salesmen and dreamers – who significantly influenced our region as we know it.
Some were college grads. Others were self-taught, grade-school dropouts. But all of them saw a need for change and found a way to make it happen. They brought us railroads, hotels, bridges and even entire cities. Their efforts impacted tourism, agriculture and everyday life in ways that are beyond measure – and still felt today. Meet seven individuals who left their indelible mark on our corner of paradise.
Henry Morrison Flagler
Photo courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County
When Henry Morrison Flagler, 83, died after falling down the steps of his Palm Beach home in 1913, a Miami newspaper called him “one of the greatest of the modern captains of industry, builder of the Florida East Coast Railroad, investor of over $50 million in Florida and the man who first noticed the great possibilities for the settlement and development of the east coast of Florida.”
Known as the father of Palm Beach, Flagler was all that and more. His childhood was complex: He left school at 14 to move to Belleview, Ohio, to work with cousins in a grain store.
That sparked his business acumen. Over the years, he ran a salt mining business; a grain business; and, most significantly, an oil business with John D. Rockefeller.
When Flagler arrived in Florida in 1878, he saw potential everywhere. He began building hotels – first in St. Augustine and then in Palm Beach, Miami and Key West, establishing Palm Beach as a winter playground for the wealthy.
Dissatisfied with the railroad service he found here, he extended his Florida East Coast Railway to the tip of the peninsula and then stretched the limits of early-20th-century technology to extend it all the way to Key West.
John Douglas MacArthur
Photo courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County
Besides Flagler, no developer had a greater impact on Palm Beach County than John Douglas MacArthur. A self-made millionaire, he ran his empire from the coffee shop at the Colonnades Beach Hotel in Palm Beach Shores, which he owned.
Born in 1897 as the son of a pastor, MacArthur grew up poor, dropped out of school after eighth grade and went on to become an insurance and real estate mogul. Before moving to Florida in 1955, he ran a mail-order insurance business in Chicago.
In Palm Beach County, he controlled 80 percent of Lake Park and all of what he named North Palm Beach. He bought thousands of acres and founded Palm Beach Gardens in 1959.
MacArthur’s holdings once included 100,000 acres of land in Florida, mainly in the Palm Beach and Sarasota areas; several development companies and shopping centers; paper and pulp companies; 19 commercial, office and apartment buildings in New York City; publishing enterprises; hotels; radio and television stations; and insurance companies.
He was certainly a colorful personality: Known to be cheap, profane and cantankerous, he was a chain-smoker who drank lots of coffee and scotch.
By the time he died in 1978 at 80, he was one of the wealthiest men in America. His fortune went to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, named for him and his second wife. MacArthur Park on Singer Island is named for him as well.
Julia DeForest Tuttle
When Flagler brought his railroad to Palm Beach, Julia DeForest Tuttle, a businesswoman who owned hundreds of acres in a fishing village farther south, convinced him to extend the tracks to her community.
She sent him a box of orange blossoms to show how frost-free her neck of the woods was (the orchards farther north had frozen). But her real bargaining chip was her promise of about half her property, which became downtown Miami.
“It may seem strange to you,” she told a friend, “but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country.”
Tuttle, born in 1849 and now recognized as the only female founder of a major American city, first saw Florida in the 1870s while visiting her father, who had moved to Lemon City (now Little Haiti). After her husband died in 1886, she relocated her family to Florida to escape Ohio’s cold winters. When her father died in 1891, she moved to Biscayne Bay and bought 640 acres on the north bank of the Miami River.
She died in 1898 at 49. But Miamians haven’t forgotten her contributions: The Julia Tuttle Causeway of I-95 to Miami Beach is named in her honor, and there’s a 10-foot-high bronze likeness of her in Bayfront Park.
“Tuttle stands proudly, eyes gazing upward with a look of satisfaction as her left arm clutches a basket of oranges and her right extends orange blossoms,” notes the SunSentinel.
Arthur Vining Davis
Photo courtesy Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum
American industrialist and philanthropist Arthur Vining Davis was first known for his work with the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). Later, he gained fame for helping grow Boca Raton.
Born in 1867, he graduated from Amherst College in 1888. His dad found him a job with the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, whose owner had developed a process to inexpensively produce aluminum. Davis became director of the company in 1907 and converted it to Alcoa, which he ran until 1958. By the end of World War II, Alcoa was producing 90 percent of all virgin aluminum in the country.
Davis owned thousands of acres of land in South Florida – along with the Boca Raton Hotel & Club (now the Boca Resort), which he bought in 1956. He paid $22.5 million for it, forking out another $1 million to renovate it and bring in golfer Sam Snead and tennis pro Fred Perry. His purchase of 1,500 acres in the community started a real estate boom.
In 1955, he introduced polo to Boca, adding fields south of the hotel. Davis’ property was transferred to a public corporation, Arvida, in 1958, but he kept 60 percent of the stock. Then, stock sales provided the capital to develop the $5 million Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club. The subdivision replaced the polo fields, which Davis spent a half-million dollars relocating to Glades Road.
Davis, who died in 1962 at 95, established foundations to support educational, cultural, scientific and religious institutions.
George Edgar Merrick
The visionary real-estate developer George Edgar Merrick, born in 1886, spent his earliest years in Miami riding in a mule-drawn cart full of guava. But it didn’t take him long to transform from a preacher’s kid tending the family farm to a millionaire conceiving one of the most creative urban- planning projects of his time.
He’s best known as the planner and builder of the city Coral Gables – one of the first planned communities in the United States – in the 1920s. The Merricks moved to South Florida from Massachusetts when he was 13. His father wanted a new start for the family after the death of a daughter. They chose Miami, known as “a brand new city where the sun always shined,” according to Arva Moore Parks, a local historian who wrote “George Merrick: Son of the South Wind.”
“They bought 160 acres of land with guava trees and a wooden shack where the Merrick House currently stands.” Merrick attended Rollins College and law school in New York but dropped out when his father got sick. He came back to manage the family grapefruit grove. His impact is visible today in Shops at Merrick Park, the tony shopping and dining complex; the thousands of trees shading the city; the streets he mapped out; and Coral Gables’ distinctive Mediterranean architecture.
He died in 1942 at 55.
Carl Graham Fisher
Doubters dubbed Carl Graham Fisher crazy when he planned to turn a “crocodile hole” into a tourist resort. That hole became Miami Beach. Now considered the father of the city, Fisher was known for wild schemes that took him from rags to riches.
Born in 1874 in Indiana, he dropped out of school in sixth grade, leading to his lifelong career as an entrepreneur. To gain fame for the bike shop he and his brothers started, Fisher resorted to stunts, once riding a bike on a tightrope between the two highest buildings in Indianapolis. He became the city’s largest bicycle and automobile dealer and then started a company that made car headlights. Along with partners, Fisher created the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indianapolis 500.
He was a key player in the construction of the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway, from New York to San Francisco, and Dixie Highway, which ran from the Midwest to Miami Beach.
After retiring to Miami in 1912, he helped build a bridge across Biscayne Bay. Fisher, who died in 1939 at 65, sold real estate on Miami Beach – again using publicity stunts.
Once, he got a baby elephant to pose as a golf caddy with visiting President-Elect Warren Harding. Newspaper photos of the pachyderm and the prez portrayed Miami Beach as “a place you had to see to believe.”
Appropriately, Miami’s Fisher Island, which has the highest per capita income of any place in the U.S., is named for Fisher, who once owned it.
James C. Dean
Photo courtesy Wilton Manors Historical Society
Alabama native James C. Dean, who vacationed in Miami in 1935, got hooked on the area’s sunshine and the possibilities for development. He saw opportunities in construction and banking and, in the 1940s, helped found the city of Wilton Manors.
Benjamin B. Little, a Wilton Manors historian, characterizes Dean as a shrewd salesman and “one of the important early movers and shakers – perhaps more shaker than mover, talking other people into spending their money.”
Although Dean, who was born in 1911, attended the University of Georgia, he never finished college. He and his late wife, LaWayne, were one of Wilton Manors’ first families.
He owned Florida Sun Life Insurance Company in Fort Lauderdale but sold it to invest in property in Oakland Park, Wilton Manors and Boca Raton. He also donated the land for the Wilton Manors Kiwanis Club and was credited with discovering the thriving corridor that is Northeast 26th Street.
Dean, who died in 2006 at 94, was also instrumental in planning the construction of the bridge on Northwest 26th Street, which was named after him.
“They told me, ‘You’ll never do anything with that area,’” Dean told the SunSentinel. “I told them, ‘We’ll see about that.’” O