After 600 Post Time columns, still mysteries to solve
This week is our 600th column! We started Jan. 19, 2000. Special thanks go to editor Tom Peeling, along with the copy editors who caught all those mistakes.
And, of course, our readers. Keep those questions coming!
Over the years, we’ve added tools to help readers — the majority from somewhere else — better understand their new home, in hopes they’ll feel like it is home.
Our Historic Palm Beach website is a century of words and pictures from The Palm Beach Post and other South Florida publications.
The web page contains every column from Post Time’s 11-plus years, as well as the contents of other archives.
Look also for the Flashback blog, the Your History page and the YourPix photo sharing site.
And look for the Place Names Map (below) on the main menu. You can click on the map for links to more than 100 place name origins.
Milestones such as column No. 600 also provide an excuse to remind you of historical mysteries we’ve yet to solve.
Two of the most infuriating are the most unlikely: the origins of Congress and Australian avenues.
We know Congress had that name at least as far back as World War II, and it might have a link to the Morrison Field military operation at what is now Palm Beach International Airport. But we find references dating to the 1920s.
For Australian, the one stretching from Blue Heron Boulevard to PBIA, archivist Debi Murray at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County reports finding references dating to the 1950s.
Here are more name origin mysteries:
• Lantana’s Mayfield, Euclid and Prospect streets.
• A stone duck that stood from around 1930 to around 1940 on Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth.
• The names behind Lake Okeechobee’s Ritta and Torry islands.
• June’s Ice Cream, Lake Worth.
• Steiner Road, Phillips Point, Lake Wyman and Seminole-Pratt Whitney Road.
And the streets in Boca Raton between Federal Highway and Dixie Highway, north of Yamato Road, with names of British cities, in alphabetical order.
Readers: We still need your help!
View Palm Beach County Place Names in a larger map
Tags: mysteries, place names
