January 2009
21 posts
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Saving the Best for Last
In 1941, its final season of six-man football, Pompano High School averaged over 43 points a game, capturing the Southeastern Florida Championship with eight victories and a tie. Starters were Forrest Cope, Billy McClellan, Harold Kercheval, Marion Fugate, Dwight Miller, Doyle Alderman and H. C. Rowlette.
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Nathan Mayo
One of the most influential Floridians of the twentieth century was a person few people now remember. Nathan Mayo began serving as the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture on November 1, 1923 and held that office until April 14, 1960. During his tenure he was an able advocate for the interests of Florida’s farmers. In 1938, when Pompano farmers went to Tallahassee to lobby for a new...
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All Together Now
The Pompano State Farmers Market opened in 1939 as a result of a $75,000 allocation by the State of Florida and a matching $75,000 from the federal government. The land was donated by Pompano’s Blount brothers: William, George and Devotie. The construction was performed by the WPA [Works Projects Administration, a New Deal agency that provided employment to allow the out-of-work to get off...
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Big Dreams
In 1831, just a year after the Baltimore & Ohio became the first operating railroad in America, the Key West Gazette called for building a railway to connect the island town of just over 500 residents to the mainland. This was at a time when the nearest towns with even moderately sizable populations were St. Augustine (over 450 miles distant) and Pensacola (about 800 miles away). It would be...
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Froze Out
During the winter of 1894 - 1895, a series of freezes hit Florida with disastrous results for the state’s citrus growers. In 1893, Florida had shipped over 5,000,000 million boxes of citrus out of state, but after the freezes the total dropped to only 147,000. Beyond the immediate economic impact, the freezes caused many Florida growers to begin planting citrus groves farther to the south.
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Rent
When William Kester’s wood-frame cottages were first built in the late 1930s, on the beach (and later, elsewhere in town), the basic rent was $16.00 a month.
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Mrs.McLean's Donation
The restored McLean House at Tradewinds Park off Sample Road was opened to the public on February 27, 1977. The house was supposedly built on the beach in the 1920s, and moved to its current site in 1960 by William and Margueritte McLean. Following William’s death in 1969, his widow stayed in the house for several years before managing the property became too difficult for her. She turned...
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The 5 O'clock Club
Almost every community had one — an informal gathering place for influential businessmen and residents to discuss the issues of the day and gather support (or opposition) for a particular candidate or issue. In Pompano, it was the so-called “5 O’clock Club,” named for its early morning meeting time at Angelo’s Restaurant on Flagler Avenue. The time was dictated...
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The Name's the Same
Although today “Lighthouse Point” is the name of one of Pompano Beach’s neighboring cities, early residents used the term to refer to the area south of the Hillsboro Inlet that is now known as Hillsboro Shores.
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Know Who You're Talking To
The tight-knit farming community of Pompano was not viewed a particularly welcoming by the new residents who came in the post-World War II period. One recently-arrived resident was quoted as saying, “You had to be very careful. A derogatory remark made to one old towner about someone might backfire. That someone might be a cousin and before you know it 39 relatives were not talking to...
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Going Up
The second floor of the Pompano Mercantile Company building (114 North Flagler Avenue) once housed a pool hall. It later became the company’s stockroom. To facilitate access to the second floor, a hand-operated elevator, Pompano’s first, was installed in 1924.
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Looking Back at the State Farmers Market
On Wednesday, January 21st, the Pompano Beach Historical Society will hold its monthly public meeting, and will feature a look back at the Pompano State Farmers Market’s early years. Bud Garner, who worked at the Market in the 1940s, will lead a discussion of the people and activities that made the facility the economic hub of agricultural life in Pompano. The program begins at 7:00 PM at...
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Sharecropping
Up through the 1940s, in Pompano (as in the rest of the South) sharecropping was an important part of the agricultural labor system. Sharecroppers would enter into a agreement with a landowner to grow crops on that land; at the end of the season, the two would split the money earned. This allowed landless farm workers an opportunity to make a profit at the end of the growing season as well as a...
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Saving at the Post Office
From the 1920s through the end of the 1940s, there was one bank located in Pompano: either the Bank of Pompano, or its successor, the Farmers Bank of Pompano. Although there may have been exceptions, by and large Pompano’s black population (and many poor whites) did not use these financial institutions. As an alternative, many residents had savings accounts at the local U. S. Post Office....
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Questions
When did Pompano’s Ocean Drive become Atlantic Boulevard? And what was the reason for the change?
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The In-Laws
William A. Petsch (1878 - 1931) and his wife Mary (1891 - 1917)were early settlers in Pompano. He was a tomato farmer and had one of the first packing plants in the area. He also operated a general store. Following the town’s incorporation, Petsch was elected to the Town Council and served as its President from 1913 to 1915. He also served as a municipal Justice of the Peace. Petsch...
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In the Line of Duty
The first Pompano Beach policeman to lose his life in the line of duty was Officer Scott Winters, who was mortally wounded while attempting to arrest a suspect on July 29, 1990. Pompano Beach’s Scott Winters Memorial Park, located at on the Intracoastal Waterway at 1199 N. Riverside Drive, was dedicated in honor of his service and sacrifice.
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Zora
On this day in 1891, the author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama. At an early age, her family moved to Eatonville, a small community near Orlando that was the first all-black town to be incorporated in the United States. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s, she wrote a number of works that depicted black life in the South, the most famous of which was the novel Their...
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Open Secrets
In the 1930s gambling was against the law everywhere in Florida except for licensed parimutuel sites, one didn’t have to go far to find a place to place a bet. In Pompano some of the bars had back rooms where card games were held. Don Downie remembers the Pompano Mercantile Company as a place “where you could get all the ‘odds’ on basketball, football, dog and horse racing...
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The Music Man
The first band director at Pompano Beach’s Blanche Ely High School was David Lee Wright (b. 1926, d. 2004).
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The First Movie House
According to one account, Pompano’s first movie house was located on Flagler Avenue, above the general merchandise store owned by W. H. McNab. His widow, Dora, mentioned in a 1974 interview that the theater was open two nights a week — one for white residents and the other for blacks. This would probably have been in the nineteen-teens.