Florida Resources

The New Deal sought to restore national economic strength in part by reallocating resources and restructuring local landscapes. Few parts of the country were transformed as significantly as South Florida. Blurring the traditional disciplinary boundaries of design history and political science, the contributors to The New Deal in South Florida explore the impact of a wide variety of New Deal projects on the region. They examine letters and photographs--many never before published--public murals, housing, parks, and architectural and community design. Heavily illustrated, this book offers historians and enthusiasts of Florida history a unique perspective on South Florida's growth during the 1930s. It reveals how Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Miami, and other communities were permanently altered by the impact of New Deal programs. It also reveals hidden gems of architecture and visual art that still exist today. Editors John Stuart and John Stack's work highlights the importance of New Deal projects to the area's development into one of the nation's premier urban districts and tourist destinations.

Discover Florida, with its unique geography and exciting history--from ancient gold to modern real estate speculation--by journeying along its highways. Beginning with a chronology and succinct account of Florida's spectacular development, then an account of the rise of the major cities, Florida History from the Highways takes you throughout the state, pointing out the fascinating events that occurred at locations along the way. you'll travel through changing times and landscapes and emerge filled with new appreciation for what has made Florida the colorful place it is today.

The story of Highway A1A--running north to south along 500 miles of famous Florida coastline--and its crucial role in the historic settlement and the future of a state adapting to 21st century demands. Highway A1A: Florida at the Edge is more than an insightful guide to the cities and towns along Florida's Atlantic coast. It is also the dramatic story of how tourism begat development, how development begat sprawl, and how this coastal corridor, almost out of the blue, created Florida's original year-round residential downtowns with the power to transform how Floridians live and how the world vacations in the Sunshine State.

Internationally publicized as the happiest place on earth decades before Disney arrived, the Sunshine State experienced a brief and wondrous economic boom in the mid-1920s. Entrepreneurs and real estate developers became overnight millionaires as they created luxury seaside resorts, golfing communities and country clubs. Greats, near greats, the famous, the infamous, movie stars, politicians, athletes, ne'er-do-wells, preachers, foreign royalty, con artists, educators, labor leaders, union members, every element of American and world society flocked to the Pleasure Paradise of the World. Florida was a perpetual motion machine, destined to go on forever. But in 1926, small bank failures led to panic, the new federal income tax law led to bankruptcy and a series of hurricanes decimated the tourist trade. Florida's great boom had gone bust, not to recover until World War II. However, Floridians remained optimistic that the sun of prosperity would rise again.

Traces the development of Florida railroads, from the first, tentative lines in the 1830s, through the boom of the 1880s, to the maturity of the railroad system in the 1920s. This title examines the decline of the industry, as the automobile rose to prominence in American culture and lines were abandoned or sold for hiking trails and green spaces.

Henry M. Flagler (1830-1913), the ambitious Gilded Age tycoon who designed and built much of Florida's fashionable east coast, rode to success on the rails. As John D. Rockefeller's closest adviser in the 1870s, Flagler helped assemble the Standard Oil empire. In this thoroughly researched biography, Akin shows that Flagler understood early in his career that cheap freight rates determined industrial profits. Portraying Flagler as an aggressive entrepreneur, Akin documents his shrewd negotiations to obtain reduced rates, rebates, and drawbacks from the railroads, thus assuring Standard Oil's national domination over oil transportation costs. Flagler drove himself as hard as he drove a bargain, obsessed with the desire to create a monument to himself that he called "my domain." His legacy was no less than modern Florida. In 1885, at the age of fifty-five, he turned his attention away from Standard Oil and began construction of the Ponce de León luxury hotel in St. Augustine, the city where he had honeymooned with his second wife. Realizing he could never fill its rooms unless better transportation with the North was available, he embarked on the second railroad venture of his lifetime, creation of the Florida East Coast Railway. Flagler's resort empire eventually included The Breakers in Palm Beach and the Royal Palm in Miami; his Atlantic coast railroad extended all the way to Key West, an engineering achievement that was called the "eighth wonder of the world." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Flagler dominated not just the resort and railroad industries in Florida but steamship and agricultural operations, too. Florida politicians gave his projects preferential treatment, even changing the state's divorce law so he could marry for a third time. Woven into this biography are details about Flagler's family, personality, three marriages, alienation from his only son, and devotion to the Presbyterian church--copy that fueled society gossip columns from New York to Palm Beach for decades.

In a book that combines both oral history and documentary photography, Nano Riley and Davida Johns tell the story of Florida's farmworkers in the 21st century. Largely ignored by mainstream America, migrant laborers often toil under adverse labor and living conditions to provide the nation's food supply. Intimate photographs and lucid text offer a look not only into the difficulties faced by these laborers but also into the rich cultural heritages of their communities and the close ties of their family life.

An introduction to the major industries, crops, and livestock cultivated in Florida.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication, and many of the postcards produced during this "golden age" can today be considered works of art. Postcard photographers traveled the length and breadth of the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in general stores across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in America's history.

Whether you're responsible for acres of orange, tangerine, or grapefruit trees, or just grow limes and lemons in your backyard, Citrus Growing in Florida has been an indispensable guide for nearly fifty years. Now available in a fifth edition, this concise, comprehensive book combines the practical day-to-day aspects of citrus growing with underlying horticultural principles in a clear, easy to read style. Authors Frederick Davies and Larry Jackson have a combined eighty years of experience with citrus culture and production, teaching, extension, and research. The revisions in this edition cover new regulations, new pests and diseases, and new issues in marketing and selling citrus.

"Over the last century, the Everglades underwent an ecological and metaphorical transition from impenetrable swamp to endangered wetland. At the heart of this transformation lies the Florida sugar industry, which by the 1990s was at the center of the political storm over the multi-billion-dollar ecological "restoration" of the Everglades. Raising Cane in the 'Glades is the first study to situate the environmental transformation of the Everglades within the economic and historical geography of global sugar production and trade."
*available in print & eBook forms

This book is the story of people of vision and courage, of a small group of prominent Saint Augustine investors who conceived of the Florida waterway and began the first dredging work; of an obscure group of New England capitalists who provided significant financing and obtained a million acres of undeveloped Florida public land in pursuing what was, at best, a speculative enterprise; of innumerable citizen groups like the Florida east coast chamber associations and the larger Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association that demanded at the turn of the last century what they believed was the peoples right-a public waterway, free of the burden of tolls; and finally, of the U>S> Army Corps of Engineers, who conducted all of the Florida waterway's early surveys and assumed the project's control in 1929 to convert what was once a private toll way into Florida's modern-day, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

From the Calusa Indians to the travelers who used boats for transport in the early 1900s and up to the prosperous farms and cattle ranches of today, the Everglades has evolved into a mecca for fishing, birding, and hiking. The smell of orange blossoms entices the settler to an untamed land where bears, deer, and snakes still inhabit the wilderness and where alligator hunting and fishing are still popular sports. Lake Okeechobee is 110 miles around from Pahokee to Canal Point, Okeechobee, Lakeport, Moore Haven, Clewiston, South Bay, and Belle Glade. To cross Florida from the Atlantic to the Gulf, a boat starts in Stuart and ends at Port Mayaca, crossing Lake Okeechobee to the Moore Haven lock and out the Caloosahatchee River past Lake Hicpochee and west to Fort Myers. Around Lake Okeechobee presents images from the Clewiston Museum, Lawrence E. Will Museum, state archives, and private collections, painting a history of the boom and bust, the boaters and farmers, and the cattlemen and ranchers who have settled and raised their families here.

"Traces the long standing effort to build a canal across Florida. The book reveals much about competing visions of progress, economic growth, and environmental preservation in the fragile ecosystem of Florida, as well as the 'ins and outs,' of politics, influence, and power in the Sunshine State. The history of the canal is not just a story of Florida's past, but a compelling lesson for its future."

In the 1840s, pioneers settled on the picturesque lands surrounding the Alafia River. With glistening waters that gave life to plush foliage and citrus trees gracing its banks, the Alafia stretched westward before flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Forty years later, phosphate was discovered in the Bone Valley area, and miners began arriving in what is now Mulberry, Florida. The industrial activity of the town encouraged economic growth and soon demanded the need for a railroad to accommodate Mulberry's expanding lumber and mining trade. In 1901, the town was officially incorporated, bringing a respected identity and well-deserved peace to the people of the area. Named for a lone tree that served as a local mail drop, the town of Mulberry was born.

The discovery of oil in Tinsley, Mississippi, in 1939 captivated the South and has deeply affected the region ever since. At the end of 1940, over 133 wells were flowing, and speculators were drilling holes and staking claims all along the Gulf Coast and its immediate environs. Consequently, the region's economy, ecosystems, and politics have been shaped by black gold since the end of World War II. Alan Cockrell, a petroleum geologist, provides an insider's account of the science of oil hunting, the political processes that help or hinder it, and the advances in technology that make it all possible. This book documents the ways in which wars, foreign competition, governmental regulation, and new business models affect oil exploration, and what that means to the South's people. Just as significantly, Cockrell provides compelling commentary on the people who hunt for petroleum, from pioneering wildcatters such as Chesley Pruet to savvy geologists focusing on science and technology Drilling Ahead documents the triumphs and travails of oil hunters. Mavericks, underworld characters, professors, lawyers, and environmentalists have all played major roles in the South's oil production. A fascinating study of corporations, economies, and people, Drilling Ahead is a compelling, opinionated narrative as well as an exhaustively researched history.