Elizabeth “Betty” Hardy Warren was born in 1895 in Hypoluxo, Florida, and came to this area by boat in 1899 with her parents, Mr. And Mrs. I. I. Hardy. As there were no building supplies in Pompano, they brought lumber by boat to build a home in Pompano, not far from Lettuce Lake (today’s Lake Santa Barbara). Although the Hardy’s were not the first people to live in what is today Pompano Beach, they may have been the first that stayed.

Pompano’s first school was established the same year the Hardys arrived, and Betty attended it through the sixth grade. She then continued her education in Delray.

In 1913 she married Lucius Warren, who had moved to Pompano from Blackshear, Georgia, in 1905.

In her later years, when she was commonly called “Aunt Betty,” she reminisced about those early days, when all children wore palmetto hats to protect them from the sun, and there was always the chance of meeting a bobcat or rattlesnake on the way to school. She also remembered when Pompano settlers would salvage the cargo of shipwrecks on the beach.

Aunt Betty lived a long life, and had witnessed about as much change as any other person in Pompano Beach had by the time she passed away in 1984.