The History of Fort Lauderdale

Photos courtesy of the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society

Fort Lauderdale is one of the country’s best-known yachting destinations but its wild history has largely been forgotten by time.

To some people, it’s the “Venice of America.” To others, the “Yachting Capital of the World.” And to a few, it’s still “Where the Boys Are.” But no matter what nickname you use, boaters are drawn to Fort Lauderdale and its more than 300 miles of navigable waterways teeming with boats of all shapes and sizes. It’s home to some of the world’s best boatyards and marinas; it’s one of the world’s busiest ports for cruise ships; and it has miles of sandy Atlantic Ocean beach that locals say is the equal of any urban beach anywhere. Ft. Lauderdale is a city that grew up on a river, and it is still defined by water.

The New River is the heart of Fort Lauderdale. It connects the Everglades with the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. Native Americans traveled on the river, avoiding the marshlands, dense longleaf pine forests and mangrove swamps that made overland travel difficult. The original European settlers built their homesteads and farms along the river. Trading vessels made their way upstream to load produce and lumber for trade with the coast. Legend says the steamboat Wanderer cruised up the river in 1896 with a party of sportsmen (and possibly some friendly ladies) aboard, maybe becoming the first yacht to do so.

Today the New River is lined with boats big and small. Zillion-dollar megayachts, assisted by small tugs fore and aft, pass sumptuous mansions en route to the “Marina Mile,” a string of world-class boatyards near the river’s head of navigation. Combined with the Intracoastal marinas—including the Bahia Mar Yachting Center, opened in 1949—this concentration of marine businesses makes Ft. Lauderdale truly the “Yachting Capital of the World.”(At Bahia Mar, look for slip F-18, where Travis McGee docked Busted Flush in the novels by John D. MacDonald. There’s a plaque at the head of the slip.)

The First Fort Lauderdale

After the Spanish arrived in South Florida in 1513, the Tequesta Indians who had lived there for perhaps 4,000 years were nearly eradicated by disease and depredations, leaving the land virtually unpopulated for almost three centuries. But near the turn of the 19th century, a trickle of settlers arrived in the New River area, settling where the river splits into its North and South branches, near today’s Lewis Landing Park. Some of the first settlers were British Loyalists from the Bahamas. They found fertile soil, abundant game and plenty of fish and fowl. By the 1830s, there were between 40 and 70 inhabitants in the New River settlement.

The Seminole Indians arrived at about the same time. In the 1760s a large number of Muscogee and Miccosukee Creek Indians from southern Georgia and Alabama broke away from their tribes and moved across the border into northern Florida, accompanied by hundreds, maybe thousands, of escaped slaves and free African-Americans. The Spanish called the Indians Cimarróns (runaways), which in the Creek language is simanó-li. The name was soon garbled into Seminole. In 1817 the U.S. government sent troops, led by General Andrew Jackson, across the Florida border to retrieve the slaves. (This was the first of three Seminole wars; the last one ended in 1858.) The Seminoles who avoided capture moved south into the Everglades, which were twice as large then as today.

William Cooley and his family arrived on the New River in 1824. Cooley built a grist mill to produce flour from the roots of the Florida arrowroot, abundant around the New River. The flour—the Seminoles called it “coontie”—was used to make, among other things, ship’s biscuits that wouldn’t spoil; it was also a staple of the Seminole diet. Most of Cooley’s coontie was exported to Key West; the New River was deep enough for small ships to navigate up to his wharf. In 1831, the now prosperous Cooley was appointed Justice of the Peace for the area.

On January 6, 1836, Cooley was away from home when a band of Seminoles attacked, killing his wife, three children and the children’s tutor. None of the other settlers were harmed, and all escaped to the lighthouse at Cape Florida on Key Biscayne. The attack coincided with the start of the Second Seminole War, but in fact the cause of the New River Massacre was the Seminoles’ anger at Cooley’s failure, as Justice of the Peace, to punish the murderers of one of their chiefs. Nevertheless, settlers abandoned the New River. The Cape Florida lighthouse was itself attacked later in 1836; the keeper was injured and his assistant killed.

In March, 1838, a battalion of two hundred Tennessee Volunteers, along with a company of artillery, arrived at the New River in pursuit of Seminoles. They built a fort not far from the site of the Cooley massacre and named it after their commanding officer: Major William Lauderdale. In 1839, another contingent of troops built a second fort a short way downriver, followed by a third, more substantial one called Fort Lauderdale on the barrier beach between the Atlantic Ocean and the New River Sound, at the site of today’s Bahia Mar Yachting Center. This fort was in use until 1842, when the Second Seminole War ended. The Third Seminole War was fought in the southwestern Florida peninsula, away from the New River. When it ended in 1858, only a couple hundred Seminoles remained in the Everglades. Fort Lauderdale fell into ruin, but its name remained.

The Houses of Refuge

Shipwrecked sailors who came ashore at Fort Lauderdale could perish on the beach, within a few miles of help, because they couldn’t get to the mainland: If they made it across New River Sound, they still had to contend with a mile of impenetrable swamps. To provide aid to stranded mariners, in 1876 the U.S. government built five Houses of Refuge on the Florida coast, one of them on Fort Lauderdale’s beach. A keeper lived in each refuge, usually with a family, and kept a store of food and water to sustain castaways until they could be taken ashore. The refuge at Fort Lauderdale, U.S. Life-Saving Station No. 4, was first built roughly where E. Sunrise Blvd. intersects A1A today, but later moved south to the site of the ruined Fort Lauderdale, at today’s Bahia Mar. The U.S. Coast Guard incorporated the refuge as part of USCG Station No. 6 during World War I. In 1929, bootlegger and smuggler James Alderman was convicted of murder and piracy after killing two Coast Guardsmen and a Secret Service agent during an interdiction off the Florida coast. He was hanged at USCG Station No. 6—the only execution ever carried out by the Coast Guard.

One regular visitor to House of Refuge No. 4 was the postman. From 1885 to 1892 the mail was carried between Lake Worth and Miami by a single “Barefoot Postman” who made a round-trip every week. That’s about a 68-mile trip each way, 40 miles of it walking, the rest rowing and sailing. Until a road was built between the two cities, the easiest route was walking barefoot along the beach, crossing Hillsboro and New River Inlets en route. Back then, the New River Inlet was a natural cut in the barrier beach, not the wide ship channel that leads into Fort Lauderdale today. (That was dredged and bulkheaded in 1928, when Port Everglades was created from Lake Mabel.) The postman kept a rowboat stashed at each inlet; at Haulover Beach near today’s North Miami, he kept a sailboat that took him the rest of the way. He usually spent one night of each trip at House of Refuge No. 4 where the keeper’s wife gave him meals, a bed (welcome after a day of trooping along the beach) and a lunch to carry in his pack. Usually the mail trips were uneventful—but in October, 1887, postman James Ed Hamilton went missing on his way south, never arriving at Refuge No. 4. His mailbag, clothes and belongings were found on the north side of Hillsboro Inlet, but his boat was on the south side. It’s speculated that someone else walking south used the boat to cross the inlet, and while swimming across to retrieve it Hamilton encountered unfriendly marine life. His body was never found—but searchers found an unusually large number of alligator tracks near the inlet. (In 1951, Columbia Pictures made a movie, The Barefoot Mailman, loosely based on the beach-walking mail carriers. Theodore Pratt’s fascinating book of the same title was published in 1943—it’s well worth a read for a glimpse of a Lauderdale that no longer exists.)

Welcome to Ft. Lauderdale

In 1893 a road was opened connecting the Lake Worth area with Biscayne Bay; today it’s known as U.S. Highway 1. Scheduled stagecoach service ran three times a week, and included an overnight stop at New River. (The coach also carried the mail, so the Barefoot Mailman could put his shoes back on.) A local named Frank Stranahan was given 10 acres of land to build a way station for travelers, a ferry across the river, and a bulkhead for boats to tie up. (Today, U.S. 1 passes through a tunnel under the river.)

Originally, Stranahan’s way station was a collection of seven tents and the ferry. It was just a simple barge big enough for a stagecoach and was possibly built by Edwin King, who had a boat building and repair yard across the river—the precursor of today’s world-class yards farther upstream on the Marina Mile. Stranahan soon improved things: He replaced the tents with buildings that eventually served as a hotel, trading post, bank and post office; he was now the postmaster, too. Stranahan encouraged the Seminoles to come out of the Everglades to trade produce, animal products—especially alligator and bird feathers for manufactured goods—and built a shelter for them to camp under. They often lingered for days around the settlement, now called, officially, Fort Lauderdale. Stranahan nailed a sign declaring it so onto the front of his trading post.

The first train of the Florida East Coast Railway arrived in Fort Lauderdale on its way to Miami and, eventually, Key West in 1896, roughly following the route of the coach road. This ended the stagecoach service, ended the isolation of Fort Lauderdale, and opened the door for the settlement, still sparsely populated, to grow into a thriving city. The number of travelers discovering Fort Lauderdale exploded once the railroad arrived.

Also in 1896, a navigable waterway, the Florida East Coast Canal, was completed between Lake Worth and Biscayne Bay; today it’s part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Travelers could now arrive in Fort Lauderdale by yacht, too. Soon they would be arriving by car: The first automobile bridge over the New River was built in 1904. The stage was set for Fort Lauderdale to stop being a sleepy settlement on the New River, become the center of a Florida tourist boom in the early 20th century, and eventually to grow into the “Yachting Center of America.”

In 1901, after marrying Ivy Cromartie, a young teacher who came to Fort Lauderdale as the first schoolmarm, Stranahan built a new, bigger house, one that’s now the oldest building in Fort Lauderdale. Today’s Stranahan House is a museum dedicated not only to Frank and his wife—no one did more to help build Fort Lauderdale into the city of today—but also to the history of the city that grew on the New River. Stranahan’s bulkhead is still there, so you can visit by boat, or take the water taxi. It’s fitting to arrive at the museum by boat—Fort Lauderdale is a city of water born on a river, so why would you travel by any other means?

Before 1917, when a causeway and bridge was built over the Intracoastal and a road, Las Olas Boulevard, was cut through the mangroves, getting on and off Fort Lauderdale’s now world-famous beach required a boat. Today, the barrier beach separating the Intracoastal Waterway from the Atlantic is easy to reach from the mainland: Walk east past the posh shops and expensive restaurants on East Las Olas, cross the bascule bridge and you’re at the beach. Stop at the Elbo Room for a cool drink before crossing A1A onto the sand and you might think you’re back on Spring Break. Do I hear Connie Francis singing, “Where the Boys Are”?

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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