The Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves played their first spring training game at the new West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium on March 9, 1963. The Kansas City Athletics, featuring local boys Haywood Sullivan and Dick Howser, defeated the Braves 3-0. Warren Spahn was the losing pitcher.
The stadium was demolished in 1999. (1968 Palm Beach Post file photo)...
By BILL MCGOUN The history of Palm Beach County since World War II has been one of continuous growth. In a series of articles beginning with this one, I’d like to give a picture, as well as I can, of how Palm Beach County looked before that great boom got started. In his book Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida, Charles Pierce defined a pioneer as someone who was in South Florida before the railroad came through in the 1890s. I agree. Someone who moved into Palm Beach County in 1943, as I did, is in no way a pioneer. We had paved roads, electricity, telephones (sort of, see below), water and sewer systems. In many ways the area looked as it does today. Yet, in many other ways, it was vastly different. There were miles of open beachfront and relatively few people living between the CSX (then Seaboard Air Line) tracks and the Lake Okeechobee communities. There were six miles of open country between Delray Beach and Boca Raton, the latter then a sleepy community of roughly 1,000. World War II visible here World War II was the dominant reality everywhere in 1943. Today’s Palm Beach International Airport was Morrison Field. Much of Boca Raton, including today’s Florida Atlantic University, was an Army Signal Corps base. Resort hospitals had been converted into hospitals or convalescent facilities. I will try to re-create those days for people who never knew them, and to remind those who did know as to how it was. I have focused on the...
On March 3, 1845, Florida became a state. William D. Moseley was the first governor, and the population was about 66,000, almost half of whom were African-American slaves on cotton and sugar plantations.
Map of Florida in 1845, showing the state's geographical boundary lines and internal divisions that had been established at that time. (United States Geological Survey map)
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