March 2006
24 posts
1 tag
Entrance Exam
Although Pompano’s volunteer fire department was in constant need of able-bodied men to respond to emergencies, it wouldn’t accept just anyone who applied. One of the requirements for volunteers was that they not be afraid of heights. To find out if they were, the tallest ladder the fire department had was raised into the air with four ropes tied to the top and held straight up by...
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Where's the Fire?
In the 1920s and 1930s (and for some time after that) Pompano’s Fire Department was composed almost entirely of volunteers. There was a paid fire chief and assistant, at times, but the community had to rely on everyday citizens for fire fighting. When a fire call came in, the siren on the city’s water tank, which was located on NE 2nd Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenues, was used to...
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Depression Blues
The Great Depression came to Florida earlier than it did the rest of the nation. By the time the 1929 stock market crash, Floridians had already experienced over two years of declining economic fortunes. By 1928, tax revenues were down to the extent that the City of Pompano was forced to slash its budget. The Mayor’s salary was reduced from $100 to $75 a month. Other municipal officials...
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Mr. Chapman
Pompano’s first packing house for locally-grown produce was established in the early 1900s by J. H. Chapman, Sr. He had been sent to Pompano by Sligh & Company of Pensacola to build and run the packing house. Chapman was originally from California, but arrived in South Florida in the 1890s, gaining experience by working in a pineapple packing plant in Miami. In 1904, he married Annabelle...
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Top Fifty
What do Jimmy Buffett, Jack Eckerd, Spessard Holland and James Van Fleet have in common? All were among the people selected by the Lakeland Ledger as the “Top 50 Most Important Floridians of the 20th Century.” No one from Broward County made the list, although the county’s namesake, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, did. It’s hard to argue that any of the people selected have not...
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Paying to Get Around
In 1913, both Pompano and the automobile were fairly new when the City Council passed an ordinance requiring local automobiles pay a small fee and be registered. A little over a year later, the Council passed an assessment of $1.00, levied against “every able bodied male citizen,” so as to create a fund for repair and maintenance of local streets.
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Pompano Beach Highlands
Pompano Beach Highlands was developed by the Mackle Company of Miami in the mid 1950s. A 1958 advertisement indicates that there were four models of homes for sale: the Lime Beach for $9,550; the Orange Beach for $10,000; the Holiday Beach for $10,655; and the only three bedroom model, the Cypress Beach, costing $10,710. Homebuyers could move in for as little as a $300 FHA down payment, and...
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Discovering the Glades
In 1894, several years before the railroad opened up South Florida, Charles Richard Dodge wrote about his visit to the bottom of the Florida penensula. As part of his journey, he took a boat into the still largely unknown Everglades:I had always associated with the term “Everglades,” on the map of Florida, the picture of a low-lying, dank, dark, malarial swamp, the abode of venomous...
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Gator Harvesting
In 1899, John Mortimer Murphy, an experienced hunter and author, wrote an article titled “Alligator Shooting in Florida.” In it, he discusses the economics of commercial alligator hunting, which at that time was becoming a big business in South Florida:The hide is, primarily, the most valuable part, then comes the teeth, which are made into watch guards, breast pins, earrings and other...
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Hog Wild
Hogs were brought to Florida by the Conquistadors. Supposedly, Hernando DeSoto introduced the first hogs into North America in 1542. By the time the early pioneers were arriving in South Florida, there were abundant numbers of the descendants of these Spanish swine in the area, and as the following account from 1891 makes clear, they were not beloved by the settlers.Some portions of South...
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Centennial Committee
The Pompano Beach Centennial Celebration Committee will hold its monthly meeting on Wednesday, March 22nd, 6:30 PM at the Historical Society’s Dick & Miriam Hood Center, 217 NE 4th Avenue. All those interested in participating in the planning for Pompano Beach’s 100th anniversary in 2008 are invited to attend. In a related action, the Pompano Beach City Commission unanimously...
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Building a Church
As with many of Pompano Beach’s churches, the Thomas Temple Church of God in Christ had very humble beginnings.In the year of 1938, the late Elder Charlie Thomas, founder and father in the Lord of Thomas Temple, said the Lord told him to go across the Seaboard Railroad tracks and build a church. At that time the area was called Seaboard Highland. It was a vastly wooded area and there were...
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Baby Boomers
Pompano Beach’s rapid growth in the decade following the Second World War can be seen in the number of students attending school in the city. During the 1945-46 school year, there were a total of 1,166 students in Pompano schools. By 1955-56 the enrollment had climbed to 4,435.
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First in Her Class
Myrtle Darsey (1910 - 2003) was the valedictorian of Pompano High School’s first graduating class in 1928. That first class was composed of eight students.
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Happy Birthday
Today is the birthday of Uncle Sam — he’s 154 years old!On this day back in 1852, the New York Lantern newspaper published an Uncle Sam cartoon for the first time. The drawing was the work of Frank Henry Bellew. Through the years, the caricature changed with Uncle Sam becoming symbolic of the U.S. being just like a favorite uncle. A prime example of this symbolism were U.S. Army...
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Say it with Beans
When the first Seaboard Airline Railway train arrived in Pompano on January 8, 1927, there was a welcoming ceremony at which Mayor J. O. Cook presented SAL President S. Davies Warfield with a bouquet of green beans.
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The Oldest House
The oldest standing structure in Pompano Beach is, so far as we know, the 1910 Cap Campbell house. Now located at the corner of NE 3rd Street and 4th Avenue, it was moved there in the 1920s from its original location on NE 1st Avenue, between Atlantic Boulevard and NE 1st Street.
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Seminole History and Art
The Pompano Beach Historical Society’s public meeting on Wednesday, March 15th, will feature David Blackard speaking on the history and art of South Florida’s Seminole Indians. Mr. Blackard is the museum director of the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, located on the Seminole Tribe’s Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades. Much of the research...
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Not Many
How many people lived in Pompano when it was incorporated in 1908? About 250. The 1910 census showed the town had 269 residents. Ten years later that number had more than doubled, to 639 people.
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The Black Boom
During the 1930s, Pompano’s white population barely increased while its black residents more than doubled their numbers. The 1930 census showed a total population of 2,614 for the city, of which 1,127 were white and 1,487 black. In 1940, Pompano’s population had grown to 4,427, but the white residents totaled only 1,388 — an increase of 261. The census counted 3,039 black...
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The Long Walk Revisited
Since the previous post, I have been contacted by several individuals who had been involved in farming, going back to the 1930s. Each one was skeptical, to say the least, that anyone would walk from Fort Lauderdale to the bean fields west of Pompano to work in those fields. Their arguments are that it would take too long to get to and from the fields, that there were closer places to work, that...
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The Long Walk
Deborah Work’s 2001 book, My Soul Is a Witness: A History of Black Fort Lauderdale, has an interesting quotation from Inez Stubbs Devoe, a woman who was born in Fort Lauderdale in 1915. Ms. Devoe remembers that for black children, the school year was cut short by the need to work in the bean fields.But we enjoyed school … We had no complaints until the time came for us to go pick...
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The Courier
The City of Margate was incorporated in 1955, but did not get its first local bank, the First National Bank of Margate, until 1963. Thus, in the early years Margate business owners had to travel to Pompano Beach or Fort Lauderdale to do their banking. A solution of sorts was arrived at in the person of Mary Lou Beldin; she lived in Margate but worked for a Pompano Beach bank. As a favor to...
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Victor Semet
Jack Marqusee is rightly given credit as the developer of Margate, the first new town to be incorporated west of Pompano Beach. But one of the first individuals to visualize the residential development of these vast farmlands was Victor Semet, a transplanted New Jersey man who got into the real estate and development business after arriving in Florida.In 1953, two years before Margate was...
