LIVING HISTORY
William Jennings Bryan couldn’t sit on the sidelines for
long, not while everyone else was finding a pot of gold. The
silver-tongued evangelist hawked lots in Coral Gables from a
platform in a swimming pool. He helped draw thousands of
speculators to Miami, where workers couldn’t build hotels,
houses and high-rises fast enough. The population exploded,
and the attendant excess sewage was pumped directly into
the Miami River and Biscayne Bay.
Although it was ground zero for the money madness,
Miami wasn’t the only place overflowing with intemperate
investors. A vision was under way for transforming the palmstudded
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coastline from West Palm Beach downward into one
big area of urban sprawl. In many other communities around
the state, land-gamblers were making a sudden killing: St.
Petersburg, Tampa, Orlando, Sarasota.
GETTING INTO THE ACT
Residents of tiny Stuart felt left out. They wanted to attract
a flock of free-spending snowbirds, too. Instead, they found
themselves standing on the side of Dixie Highway watching
literally thousands of noisy Tin Lizzies pass by their hamlet
on the way to boomtowns further south. Some of those residents
had tasted wealth years before, during a brief pineapple
boom. A handful of the former planters’ impressive
houses on or near the wide St. Lucie River stood as monuments
to what prosperity once brought their community
before it decayed.
Stuart was a speck on a distant rim of massive Palm Beach
County, far from the welter of economic euphoria in the
county seat, West Palm Beach. Desolate wilderness in the
northern part of the county was of no great interest to the 4-1
majority on the Palm Beach County Commission, especially
when time came to spend tax money on infrastructure. It
only made sense to four commissioners to spend most public
monies on areas where the big crowds were coming. The
single north county commissioner did the best he could, but
in the words of one of the local boosters, Palm Beach County
treated Stuart “like an abused stepchild.”
Small-town investors can dream as big as city slickers. A
plan was hatched to secede from mighty Palm Beach County.
If they could control their own fate, Stuart boosters believed,
they could quickly turn their village into the most important
port city south of Savannah. Visions of major industries and
ocean liners loomed in their collective pipe dreams. Hobe
Sound was to become a motion picture capital. Indiantown
FLORIDA MEMORY PROJECT
In seeking recognition for Martin County, Stuart residents wanted to see
more tourists like these visiting the Stuart tourist camp in the 1920s.
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SLC HISTORY CENTER
Like the rest of much of coastal south Florida, Stuart was on the verge of land boom in the early 1920s.
FLORIDA MEMORY PROJECT
Gov. John W. Martin and wife Lottie in 1925.