Today, where quiet streets line a suburban Florida neighborhood, a small, bustling town of sorts once stood. When the Everglades were drained in the early 1900s, it created dry land that eventually became host to several Florida cities that were formed in the mid-twentieth century. For many of those new municipalities, agriculture was an interim stage in the history of the area before incorporation took place. One such city, Coral Springs, was the site of a vast farming and ranching enterprise which included a now-forgotten settlement that existed decades before the city was established.
Karl Miller explains.
President Harry Truman at Everglades National Park in December 1947.
Prior to 1900, southern Florida was dominated by the enormous Everglades wetlands area, precluding development of much of the region. Florida leaders launched the Everglades Drainage District in 1913, a body that oversaw the construction of a series of canals to drain the wetlands. The success of these efforts led to an increase in available real estate, helping to create the Florida land boom of the 1920s.
1920s and 1930s
Henry Lawrence Lyons (1893-1952), a farmer based in Pompano Beach, a city in Broward County on the southeast Atlantic coast, began his Florida career in earnest in the 1920s. A Georgia native, Lyons participated in the real estate boom, purchasing tracts of vacant property several miles inland and gradually building up a sizeable ownership while also serving two terms as a county commissioner. This buying activity was capped by an enormous 6,200-acre purchase in 1934, property that would later become Coral Springs. (1)
Using heavy mechanical equipment, Lyons and his workers cleared his holdings of natural vegetation, occasionally resorting to dynamite for more difficult situations. He dug his own system of canals to increase drainage from the grounds, made gravel roads, and created three-acre plots throughout the area. Lyons then planted crops, predominantly green beans, which were harvested by a seasonal team of 600 laborers, then sent to a facility in Pompano Beach which cleaned and sorted the crop before packaging them for distribution across the United States.[1] By 1938, his operations were “on a tremendous scale, his payrolls gigantic” with shipments running “. . . into the millions of packages.” ([2]) When the 1930s ended, his enterprise expanded further to include cattle raising.
While Lyons lived in Pompano Beach, his roughly one hundred permanent employees lived year-round in the workers quarters, described by a 1939 visitor:
. . . at the center of the farm there is a veritable town – a cluster of buildings which
includes hurricane-proof cabins . . . anchored in concrete foundations. Here are the
stables, sheds, and the machine shop, which has just about every gadget imaginable
for making home repairs to the fleet of tractors, trucks, plows, listers, planters,
ground dusters, and countless other machines . . . ([3])
The group of buildings was the nucleus of farm activity. Workers were largely African American, including sharecroppers Lyons brought from Georgia with the promise of employment during the Great Depression. They worked long hours in the fields and dealt with a range of perils including mosquitoes, alligators, poisonous snakes, and extreme heat, before returning each day to their quarters. Their efforts were a main component driving Broward County green bean production from a 1930 reported value of $800,529 to 1950 sales of $5,638,227. ([4])
Post-war period
In 1945, the United States Geological Survey created a map of Pompano Beach, including the Lyons farm. Far removed to the west from the nearest part of the city, a cluster of over two dozen structures appeared in the middle of the farm just north of Pompano Canal. Today, it would have been located close to Three Mountains Park, a city recreational area near the intersection of Riverside Drive and Atlantic Boulevard. ([5])
In 1952, Lyons died, and ownership of his estate passed to Lena, his wife. She ran the farm for ten years before selling the entire property in 1962 for one million dollars to Coral Ridge Properties, a South Florida development corporation looking to meet enormous post-war demand for suburban housing. Coral Springs was formally incorporated by an act of the Florida legislature the following year, and agricultural operations wound down to a close.
As a planned community, Coral Springs was built according to an intentional design. A series of aerial views taken regularly by Broward County from 1963 onward showed as construction gradually changed the landscape around the old buildings until they were finally demolished in the mid-1970s. ([6]) A subdivision named Shadow Wood then rose over the site, leaving no trace of the Lyons era behind.
While the rapid growth of Florida in the twentieth century seemed to almost create residential areas from thin air, the land had a past. As with many other new Florida cities of the time, Coral Springs was built on ground that had previously been agricultural. While gone now, the farm it followed had itself supplanted the natural state of the environment, transforming it and preparing it, in a way, for the next phase in the history of the area.
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[1] Clarence Woodbury, “Titan of the Bean Patch,” The Country Home Magazine 63(1), January 1939.
[2] Fort Lauderdale News, November 30, 1938.
[3] Woodbury, “Titan of the Bean Patch.”
[4] United States Census Bureau, 1930 Census: Agriculture Volume 2. Reports by States, with Statistics for Counties and a Summary for the United States, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, accessed December 18, 2024 at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/agriculture-volume-2/03337983v2p2ch07.pdf; United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Agriculture. Part 18: Florida, Statistics for Counties. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, accessed December 18, 2024 at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/agriculture-volume-1/34059685v1p18ch2.pdf.
[5] United States Geological Survey, Fort Lauderdale North Quadrant, Scale 1:24000, Washington, DC, 1945.
[6] Broward County Urban Planning Division, Aerials 1963 to 2000, Broward County, Florida, Township 48, Range 41, Section 34, 2000, accessed December 17, 2024 at https://www.broward.org/Planning/Pages/GIS.aspx.
