The 1837 skirmish on the north shore of the big lake is approaching its 175th anniversary.

The battle, on Christmas Day 1837, was the biggest and bloodiest fight of the Second Seminole War, one of America’s most controversial, and mostly forgotten.

At an expanse of sawgrass, chest-high water and muck, Gen. Zachary Taylor — later president — led about 1,000 U.S. soldiers and Missouri volunteers who routed several hundred Seminoles.

The new park is itself a stunning victory for forces who for decades fought to protect the site from encroaching development.

In 2006, as part of the $3 billion Florida Forever program, the state agreed to buy 145 of the 211 acres at the battlefield, which the National Trust for Historic Places had listed as one of America’s 11 most endangered historic sites.

Officials said it likely would have ended up as townhomes.

Plans include a small museum that will describe the battle and house artifacts found at the site.

While the site will host this weekend’s reenactment, it’s not yet open as a park. No structures have been built yet.

The Second Seminole War, 1835 to 1842, was the longest and most expensive the white man waged against American Indians and draws parallels to Vietnam.

Soldiers were sent far away to an inhospitable swamp to fight locals familiar with the territory, and it was a war of attrition in which three died of disease for every one killed in battle.

After the war, the Seminoles were scattered, with about 600 shipped west as part of the “Trail of Tears” and the rest vanishing into the Everglades. In 1939, West Palm Beach and Fort Pierce chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a roadside marker (above) along U.S. 441 near the battlefield. In November 2011, the marker was moved to the new park site.

The Battle of Okeechobee State Park site is at 3500 S.E. 38th Ave. in Okeechobee.

Willard Steele, playing the part of Gen. Zachary Taylor who fought in the Seminole War at Okeechobee, sets up the Missouri Volunteer Flag at the battle site south of Okeechobee. (1987 Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

According to Donald Curl’s Mizner’s Florida: American Resort Architecture, the company ran out of money before it built a permanent studio, so WFLA’s broadcasts originated from a frame structure covered with palmetto fronds at the corner of Palmetto Park Road and NW Fourth Avenue. The station shut down within a year as Mizner’s empire collapsed.

WFLA radio towers in 1927. (Photo courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum)

The concrete bases for the radio towers are still visible on the lawn in front of the Boca Raton Museum of Art School on Palmetto Park Road. (Photo courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum)

But that’s how long our county, and several of its cities and landmarks, have had their names.

Think “Palm.”

On Jan. 9, 1878, the 175-ton brig Providencia (pictured above) was bound from Trinidad to Cadiz, Spain. Its cargo: 20,000 coconuts.

It turned out the sailors had dipped into the grog a bit during the voyage. So when the ship grounded on the coast of what is now Palm Beach, the tipsy crew thought it had landed in Mexico.

Once they realized where they were, they decided the ship could not go on with its cargo.

The few local residents of what was then called “the lake region” rushed to the beach.

“I was greeted by the mate of the vessel, with a bottle of wine and a box of cigars, as a sort of olive branch,’’ pioneer William Lanehart wrote. “There were 20,000 coconuts, and they seemed like a godsend to the people. For several weeks, everyone was eating coconuts and drinking wine.”

Lanehart (above on the left) and fellow pioneer Hiram Hammon (above, right) took the nuts as salvage and sold them for 2 1/2 cents each. Within a decade, the area was filled with palm trees, and the island had a new name.

On Jan. 15, 1887, a post office was established for Palm City. But settlers learned another post office already had the name, so it was renamed Palm Beach.

But that Palm City isn’t the one in Martin County. Sandra Thurlow’s History of Martin County suggests that name didn’t surface there before 1910 or 1912.

According to the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, “Edmund M. Brelsford and his brother, John, applied for a Palm City Post Office in January 1887, and were notified that the name had been approved for an office near Fernandina just a month earlier. Gus Ganford, a winter visitor from Philadelphia, is credited with suggesting… ‘Palm Beach,’… recorded in October 1887. ”

Postcard from around 1939 with the caption “The Orange Blossom Special Going Througg Orange Groves in Florida.” (Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida)

Postcard from the 1920s of the Seaboard station in West Palm Beach. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

The Seaboard station in 1969 (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

But we never can get enough of the day it snowed!

Here’s a column we did on the 30th anniversary in 2007:

This week marks the 30th anniversary of one of South Florida’s most profound weather events. On Jan 19, 1977, the unthinkable happened: It snowed in South Florida.

The white fun was tempered by the very un-Florida chill. Three straight days of record lows had stressed out Florida Power & Light and some 60,000 homes in Palm Beach County were without power the night before.

All the weather gods had to line up for the snow to happen. Normally, the ground radiates too much warmth into the atmosphere to cause snow crystals to form. At sunrise, the mercury was in the upper 20s and a 40 mph wind swirled.

The snow began to fall at 6:10 a.m. There was a bit of a dusting. One fourth of an inch was recorded at Palm Beach International Airport and a half-inch unofficially in other parts of the county.

The snow lasted less than three hours. By 8:40 a.m. the last of the flurries were gone and the sun had burned off any accumulation.

The next day, Jimmy Carter was inaugurated president. But back in South Florida, everyone was still talking about the snow — and the cold.

The 27-degree reading recorded on Jan. 20, 1977, at PBIA is the all-time low for the area. Temperatures dropped below freezing for up to 14 hours, causing $2 billion in losses, mostly to crops.

Of course, that wasn’t the last this area saw of bitterly cold weather. For 10 straight days in January 2010, lows were below 45, the longest streak since 1956.

Snowflakes are captured in this Jan. 19, 1977, photo from Belle Glade. The historic snowfall lasted about 2 1/2 hours. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Update: After our Dec. 15 and Dec. 22 columns on A Florida Pioneer: The Autobiography of Joseph Lark Priest, readers inquired about obtaining the book. Priest’s great-granddaughter, Pam Priest Tubbs, self-published it in 2010. The family printed 500 copies and is distributing them to historical societies in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast and across Florida. You can obtain a book directly by contacting Pam Tubbs at 895 SW Rustic Circle, Stuart, FL 34997. You can email her at pamt@bellsouth.net.

The Flagler Museum recently wrapped up its exhibition, “First Train to Paradise: The Railroad That Went to Sea.”

Here’s something we wrote in 1994, on the centennial of the opening of his first Palm Beach hotel, the Royal Poinciana:

Henry Flagler had one last accomplishment in mind: the monumental task of building a 128-mile-long oversea railroad to link the mainland with Key West.

The railroad cost Flagler $20 million, two-fifths of his total Florida investment. Detractors called it “Flagler’s Folly.’’

But in 1912, after seven years of work by 3,000 to 4,000 men, the railroad had come to Key West.

While The Miami Herald would call it the eighth wonder of the world, critics who said it never would pay for itself were proven right. The wonder would last less than a quarter century before it was demolished by the 1935 “Labor Day” storm and replaced by the Overseas Highway.

But on that glorious day in January 1912, a stooped and weak Flagler made a triumphant entrance to a frenzied Key West, where he was overcome by the import of the moment.

A dapper, though weakened, Henry Flagler walks triumphantly off his train when it arrives for the first time in Key West in 1912. (Photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection)

While his friend John Rockefeller was trying to make it to age 100 up in Ormond Beach — he failed by three years in 1937 — Flagler also was falling victim to age. He could barely see or hear. He had become introspective and lonely and would be seen sitting silently.

A year later, in January 1913, while entering a bathroom around the side from Whitehall’s lobby stairway, he fell down three steps to the landing below, breaking his hip. He later would slip into a coma. His son Harry, estranged from his father since 1894, rushed to his side, but it was too late: Flagler did not recognize him.

Flagler died May 20, 1913, at 83 in a cottage next to The Breakers.

Artists from the Art Guild of the Purple Isles and Island Christian School put the finishing touches on a 60-foot-wide outdoor mural last month in Key Largo. The mural, at mile marker 95, depicts Henry Flagler’s Florida Keys Over-Sea Railroad. The artwork was created for the Jan. 22 centennial anniversary of the completion of the ‘railroad that went to sea.’ Though The Miami Herald called it the eighth wonder of the world, it remained in operation only until September 1935, less than a quarter of a century. (AP/Andy Newman/Florida Keys News Bureau)

We’re reminded that history is about real people. On Jan. 16, 2005, we ran a feature on the slayings of two federal agents in West Palm Beach. We’d found relatives of Robert Moncure thanks to his surname, but not Frank Patterson. This past November, I received this email:

A week or so ago, while browsing the Internet, I discovered a copy of your article, dated January 16, 2005, and titled ‘75 Years Ago: Murder and Moonshine.’

While I am not sure what may have motivated you to write the article or the newspaper to publish, some 75 years after an event that most people might view as an insignificant bit of history, I wish to personally thank you and the paper for doing so. Otherwise, I might have never learned the details of the death of Frank Patterson, who was my grandfather.

After my grandmother moved to Tampa to raise her children, the details of those days were not often discussed by her. She died in the 1950s, while I was still a child, and growing up, all I learned from her children, my father, aunt and uncles, was that he died from a shotgun blast while attempting to serve a warrant during Prohibition. Even my Uncle James Patterson, who is Frank Patterson’s last surviving child and who is a retired schoolteacher living in California, knew very few details, other than that, as he was an infant at the time.

I have shared your article with my uncle, his daughter and my own children and grandchild, and they are also grateful for your efforts in researching and writing of those events so long ago.

You might find the following a bit ironical…A fact that I never knew was that I was born in 1951 on the anniversary of his Jan. 18 death. Likewise, the fact that, after I closed my real estate and civil law practice in Tampa, in 1986, I moved to Houston,where I have since practiced law exclusively as a criminal defense attorney — something my grandfather might have looked on with displeasure.

Thank you…for your efforts as they have reached across time and space and touched more hearts, in a positive way, than you could have imagined.

Richard Steven Patterson

Click on the image to read the Jan. 19, 1930 account of the shooting as published on the front page of The Palm Beach Post.

The original clubhouse meeting room in the old Pennsylvania Hotel in the 1930s. (Photo from West Palm Beach Fishing Club Archives. Click here to see more photos and read more about the history of the club.)

The West Palm Beach Fishing Club building in 2009. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)