Historical and hilariously inaccurate maps of Florida

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the legend.

It goes something like this: Juan Ponce de León, a Spanish conquistador, discovered Florida in 1513 as part of a maniacal quest to find the Fountain of Youth. He named the peninsula “La Florida,” the Spanish word for “flowery”, after the tropical plants he saw.

León returned to Spain after skirting Florida’s coasts and briefly venturing into the Keys. Spain then began colonizing the territory, starting with St. Augustine. Florida would swap hands between Spain and Great Britain several times before eventually becoming American territory in 1822.

Regardless of Florida’s mythology, one thing is sure: its borders have always been debatable. Historical maps demonstrate the different eras of Florida’s history. Here are some of the most interesting maps I’ve found online:

• Spanish Florida (1591): This is one of the earliest maps of Florida by Jacques le Moyne, a French artist who accompanied French explorers in an ill-fated attempt to colonize North Florida. In this map, the territory stretches all the way to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Georgia. Note the oversized Bahamas and Native American settlements scattered throughout the map. There’s also a dragon in the Gulf of Mexico.
• British Florida (1763): In 1763, Spain traded Florida to the British for control of Cuba. Most of the Spanish population left Florida and Great Britain began to offer free land for British settlers. This map shows how British speculators carved out two Floridas, East and West Florida.
• Spanish Florida, Part II (1802): The Spanish took back control of Florida while Great Britain focused on the Revolutionary War against the colonies. However, Florida’s new borders were fuzzy: Americans insisted that the new territory was smaller than the Spanish wanted. At one point, West Florida rebelled and established its own country for 90 days. Finally, Florida starts to look like its actual geography — except for the mountain range in the middle!
• American Florida (1893): The United States eventually annexed Florida in 1822. For decades, Americans fought Native Americans for dominance in the state. This map shows the railroad system in central Florida at the turn of the century. The railroad system would form veins of traffic up and down the state and eventually inspire the highway system.

Nostalgia for the Space Age

Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-126 Launch by hyku

The space shuttle Endeavor took off from Cape Canaveral last Friday night. The launch is one of the last for the shuttle program. In 2010, NASA will officially end it to make way for a new generation of shuttles several years down the road.

Space exploration in the US is showing its age. Most media coverage these days seems to focus on disasters and screw-ups.  Does anyone really care about a program sparked by Sputnik in the ’60s? Where are the glamorous astronauts and sci-fi contraptions?

After the shuttle program ends, no humans will take off from Cape Canaveral for at least five years. When NASA shut down the Apollo program in the ’70s, unemployment soared.

Today, the economy is more diverse. But the space program and Florida have always been linked — and echoes of the Space Race are everywhere.

Many towns saw their first development because of the economic boom caused by NASA. Public schools are still named Challenger 7 and Astronaut High. You can order “moonburgers” in restaurants. The tourism industry in Brevard County is essentially an ode to the Cold War.

Apollo 6 Launched by Florida Memory Project

Florida Moonport USA, a promotional film by NASA from the early ’60s, shows the space industry in Florida at its prime: the Mercury launches, space-themed consumer products, 12 gallons of gas for $3.60 and Miss Baker, the fearless space monkey.

The “golden age” of space exploration may be over, but the launches still attract the attention of Floridians and people elsewhere. The New York Times article at the beginning of this post sums it up nicely:

…for now, the launchings still provide the thrumming excitement of millions of pounds of hardware being muscled into the sky by millions of pounds of thrust. Forty minutes after the launching, Michael D. Griffin, the normally reserved administrator of NASA, walked through the Kennedy Space Center press room, paused briefly and exclaimed, “Was that great, or what?”

Romanesque restrooms in St. Petersburg

comfort station by leesean

My Florida History has a great post on a particularly pretty comfort station, or public restroom, in St. Petersburg.

Architect Henry Taylor designed the restroom in a Romanesque Revival style in the 1920s. He was inspired by massive European cathedrals — Romanesque Revival architecture is characterized by round window arches, thick walls, buttresses and high vaulted ceilings.

The restroom looks oddly like another Romanesque Revival building Taylor designed two years earlier in St. Petersburg: the St. Mary Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church. Local legend says that Taylor designed the restroom to look like the church because the congregation didn’t pay him enough for the church design.

After his death, Taylor’s wife denied that he intentionally made the two buildings look similar and said the congregation paid him appropriately. Residents of St. Petersburg still call the comfort station “Little St. Mary’s” in reference to the similarities between the two buildings.

Charlie Wall, the King of Bolita

Charlie Wall was Tampa’s first crime lord. In the 1900s, gambling flourished in Ybor City, a working class Cuban neighborhood dominated by cigar workers. Wall, a Tampa native, bootlegged booze and ran brothels in Ybor. But he became one of the most powerful mobsters in Tampa by monopolizing a simple lottery game.

Cubans brought bolita, or “little ball” in Spanish, to Tampa in the 1880s. It basically worked like modern lotteries. The dealer placed a set of 100 numbered balls in a sack and took small bets on the numbers. The gamblers then passed the bag from person to person to mix the balls. Eventually, someone reached into the bag and picked a ball at random.

Wall’s bolita ring almost always rigged the games. Sometimes the dealers would place multiple balls with the same number in a bag. Other times, they would get more creative — before the game, they put a certain ball in ice to make it colder and easy to pick out of the bag. They also sometimes filled certain balls with lead to sink to the bottom.

Wall murdered rivals, paid off politicians and police to keep his bolita rings running until the 1950s. Italian mobsters finally murdered Wall in 1955 after three earlier attempts on his life. Someone slit the 75-year-old’s throat in his home.

Crackdowns on all forms of gambling in the 1950s eventually destroyed bolita. Supposedly, Wall’s empire encouraged the creation of the lottery in Florida.

Today, you can still see the spots where shootouts between Wall’s minions and the Italian mafia took place.

Quirky vintage postcards from Florida

Weeki Watchee by profkaren

To expand on last week’s visual theme, I found a great Flickr set of vintage postcards from Florida. You can often find collections of thousands of old postcards like these in antique stores here.

While most of these are from the 1950s, Floridians have sold postcards to tourists ever since the state became a prime vacation spot in the 1900s.

I like how the cards are so detached from reality. An important part of Florida tourism has always been cultivating that tropical, kitschy “fantasy land” stereotype the cards portray so well.

Ikwatu has a nice post about the evolution of “Floridiana” with several slideshows of postcards from different decades. The cards are so entrenched in tourism here that Orlando actually has a memorial dedicated to them.

If you’re interested in seeing more, the University of Miami also has a collection of 5,000 vintage postcards online organized by subject.

A snapshot of winter holidays in the Sunshine State

Bud Bassette decorating an underwater Christmas tree at Weeki Wachee (1948)

Thousands of snowbirds flock to Florida every year to forget it’s winter, but Floridians make a big deal out of Christmas.

The Florida Memory Project has a great gallery of kitschy and occasionally weird holiday photographs and artifacts taken in the Sunshine State — from building snowmen out of sand at the beach to a postcard comparing Florida to the snow-covered north.

Christmas even has its own ZIP code about 20 miles outside Orlando. In December, thousands of people send their holiday cards through the post office to get them postmarked.

The picture to your left is part of another weird holiday tradition here. Weeki Wachee Springs, famous for its singing mermaids, has decorated a Christmas tree underwater each December since its opening in 1947.

In the 1950s, Weeki Wachee was one of the most popular tourist stops in the state. For a recent look at the mermaids, check out Supergrass’ music video “Low C” shot at the springs.

Swamp buggies: Naples’ mucky, messy tradition

Swamp Buggy Parade - Naples Florida by naplesrealestate

They started out as tall, lurching, top-heavy wooden craft awkwardly attached to gigantic balloon tires. They’ve turned into refined racing machines.

Sort of.

The swamp buggy was first created in Naples in the 1920s. As impractical as they may look, they were invented out of necessity. Hunters wanted something that could clear the tall cypress stumps in the Everglades without getting stuck in the swamp muck.

They were the equivalent of today’s modded pickup trucks, but were hacked together out of old odds and ends: used car and truck parts, motorcycle motors, tractor tires and boats. After World War II, hunters even used huge surplus bomber tires to lift the trucks.

Needless to say, they didn’t always work. Swamp buggy hunters had to test their new creations, so they drove them to boggy spots in town and tried to take them through the mud. The result was, well, messy.

Watching the work-in-progress vehicles sputter and stall in the muck turned into a spectacle, and the swamp buggy races were born. Organizers designed the races to match the conditions in the Everglades. The winners won shotguns or camping gear.

In 1949, swamp buggy drivers started parading through town and crowning a Swamp Buggy Queen before the race. Pageant contestants competed to raise money for local charities. Afterward, the queen and race winner jumped, gown and all, into a 6-foot mud pit called the Sippy Hole — it was named after a Mississippi cracker whose buggy always got stuck in the deepest part of the race. The Swamp Buggy Parade thus became a tradition in Naples as hunting season started each year.

Florida outlawed hunting in the Everglades during the 1960s, so modern swamp buggies are quite different from their awkward wooden ancestors. These days, Naples residents often shell out more than $100,000 to make the ultimate muck-eating machine. A slideshow from Guernica captures the feel of today’s swamp buggy races and parade: flashy and, above all, Floridian.

Although it’s no longer about hunting, the parade has expanded into a citywide event — large cash prizes and weird buggy designs draw a huge crowd every year. And don’t worry, they still crash, flip and get stuck in the mud. The 2008 annual race will be held Saturday outside of Coastland Mall.

St. Francis, Florida’s forgotten ghost town

St. Johns River, St. Francis settlement site by TheKruger

Florida Nature just posted a photo essay on his attempt to find St. Francis, a pioneer boom town in the Ocala National Forest that disappeared in the 1930s.

Long after a Spanish settlement abandoned the area because of a yellow fever outbreak, Americans founded St. Francis along the St. Johns River in 1887. For two decades, the town thrived on a successful lumber and citrus crop boosted by its prime riverside spot.

Steamboats constantly passed through the town to bring supplies to the rest of North Florida and the citrus industry attracted many settlers — at one point, St. Francis had a general store, hotel, post office, health resort, sanitarium and weekly paper.

In 1894, two back-to-back harsh freezes hit North Florida and ravaged the citrus crop in St. Francis. At the same time, a growing network of railroads took business away from the steamboat industry. The town suffered immensely.

The post office closed in 1909 and all the residents from St. Francis moved away. During the Great Depression, people dissembled the entire town and used the wood for lumber.

Although you can hike to St. Francis, it almost looks like the town never existed. The forest swallowed up most of what the settlers didn’t take. Besides the remains of an old railroad bed and levee, the only evidence of humans is a cemetery full of the Spanish settlers who first inhabited the area.

Peacock proliferation and the Pill

Grove Peacocks by imagemd

This might just be the prettiest animal infestation you’ve ever seen.

Coconut Grove has a serious peacock problem. The situation is so dire that Miami officials are considering giving them birth control.

Grove residents estimate that about 40 peacocks have overrun a small stretch of Micanopy Avenue. Although some say they’re part of the Grove’s old “bohemian” feel, others insist the peacocks just make a mess and a lot of noise — all on the front lawns of their million-dollar homes.

Officials are looking into feeding the birds hormonal contraceptives similar to the kind women take — essentially, the Pill. The peacocks will go about business as usual, but won’t lay eggs that hatch. Cities in California have used the drug to control pigeon populations.

This is not the first time Miami-Dade County has dealt with unruly birds, but the peacocks offer a unique challenge.

Miami-Dade started its Chicken Busters program in 2007 for a similar county-wide chicken problem. Errant fowl are rounded up and sold to South Florida farms to control the population. Trapping laws protecting peacocks and Coconut Grove’s status as a bird sanctuary prevent the county from using the same tactics.

The stories behind Two Egg, Florida

Welcome to Two Egg! by da_mere

If you blink, you’ll miss Two Egg.

That’s the local saying in this tiny town on the Florida-Georgia border. Once a crossroads for Native American tribes, Two Egg was settled by Americans right before the Civil War. It hasn’t grown much since then, but its strange name is legendary — not even the residents are sure why it’s called Two Egg. Here are some of the explanations:

The town was originally called Allison after a mill company that set up shop in the area. But the Great Depression hit the town hard. It became so poor that most residents reverted to a barter system — locals often traded their farms’ products for general store items. The story goes that two local boys would trade two eggs for sugar at the general store so often that regulars started calling the store the “Two Egg Store.” Traveling salesmen spread the name to other areas in Florida.

Other stories say that a traveling preacher used to pay for his room and board with two eggs or that the first product the general store sold was packages of two eggs. Another one simply says that locals simply dropped two eggs on the road to fry and proclaimed the town Two Egg.

The name first appeared on a map in the 1940s. There are other theories, but when it comes down to it: nobody is quite sure why Two Egg is called Two Egg.