In 1874, Congress authorized the establishment of havens for shipwrecked travelers in coastal states and along the shores of the Great Lakes. The first five houses of refuge in Florida opened in April 1876, among them the Orange Grove House of Refuge in Delray Beach and Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge in Stuart. The Orange Grove House of Refuge is no longer standing, but Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge — now a museum — is the only house of refuge that remains in Florida.
The Orange Grove House of Refuge was named for the grove of sour orange trees at the site where it was built. The house burned in 1927. (Photo courtesy of the Delray Beach Historical Society)
The Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge in 1956. Gilbert was a 19th-century pirate named who worked the waters around what is now called Hutchinson Island, where an offshore reef came to be known as Gilbert’s Bar. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: boats, buildings, This Week in History
On Feb. 22, 1930, the port officially opened, with a parade and water pageant and speeches by notable visitors. The first boat to dock at the port was the Baltimore & Carolina freighter, the Betty Weems.
Tags: boats
The ferry that carried tourists and residents from the West Palm Beach municipal docks on Flagler Drive to the Biltmore Hotel in Palm Beach was dubbed a ‘horizontal elevator’ in a 1963 feature in The Palm Beach Post-Times.
Its colorful history has been featured in Post Time columns in 2007 and 2010.
Bruce Colyer of Fort Lauderdale — who along with his mother, Lucile DeTar Colyer, owned and operated the ferry until 1966 — sent a trove of photos and articles about the history of the ferry to Post Time columnist Eliot Kleinberg, but we didn’t have enough space in newspaper to share them all.
News clip about Lucile DeTar Colyer appearing on ‘To Tell the Truth.’ (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Lucile Colyer and her son Bruce on the deck of the Paddlewheel Queen. In 1965 The Palm Beach Post profiled the boat’s journey from Dubuque, Iowa. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
In 1941 the Pegg was hurriedly remodeled for war-time ferry service. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
The Pegg after remodeling. The Palm Beach Post reported that the Pegg treated convalescent sailors to a cruise on Lake Worth in 1945. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
A washboard band played on the ferry boats and up and down 1st Street and Clematis Street during the war years. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
The Greyhound also served as a ferry boat during the war years, from 1941 to 1946. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
This May 1965 photo from the Quincey collection of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County has the caption: “Endless history in one picture.” (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
A 1959 postcard: Jungle Cruiser on beautiful Lake in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
The dock in West Palm Beach (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Ferry promotional card (Courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
A photo by Virgil R. Boozer Studios, West Palm Beach, with the caption: 1945 ferry docks (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Undated photo, probably from the late 1940s or ’50s (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Postcard with the caption: “Florida’s oldest ferry ride on the intracoastal waterway between the Palm Beaches” (Courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
The Lew DeBerry, probably during the war years (Photo courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Promotional card (Courtesy of Bruce Colyer)
Tags: boats, Intracoastal Waterway, World War II
A 2007 column mentioned the World War II-era ferry between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. We learned “Captain Jack” De Los DeTar operated the service into the 1960s and that DeTar’s sister and her son operated a dinner boat in the Fort Lauderdale area. We sought them without luck.
Bruce Colyer in Fort Lauderdale, now 75, is the son. A friend recently sent him the 2007 article. Bruce filled in several blanks for us:
In the early 1900s, Henry Flagler had a ferry that ran workers from West Palm Beach to build his Palm Beach hotels.
Flagler sold it to a man named De Berry who ran it until one night in 1941, when he slipped off a dock, hit his head and drowned.
The widow had no interest in the ferry and turned it over to the assistant, “Captain Jack,” who had lost his left hand in a welding accident in Kansas and had come to Palm Beach County when his father, a doctor, retired to the area.
Jack lobbied his sister, struggling opera singer Lucile DeTar Colyer, and her son Bruce to move down from Larchmont, N.Y. Bruce was all of 6.
“The first morning he woke me,” Colyer recalled recently. “He put a Coke box there, and said, ‘stand on that and start steering.’ ”
It was September 1941. When war broke out a few months later, the ferry had a windfall running soldiers, 6 a.m. to midnight, at a nickel a head.
After the war, the young teen had an idea. He and his mother bought Little Munyon’s Island, near North Palm Beach. They debuted the 100-passenger Paddle Wheel Queen; it plied the Intracoastal and docked at the island, where guests enjoyed a cookout and a floor show.
That led to a 400-passenger Queen, which eventually sought a larger market in Fort Lauderdale. “The first cruising supper club in Florida” ran from 1966 to 1988.
The Colyers still ran the West Palm to Palm Beach ferry, but only until 1966; it fell victim to the motor car and the bridges across the waterway.
From the 1890s to roughly the 1960s, a ferry service operated between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. For just a nickel or a dime, one could travel from one side of the Intracoastal Waterway to the other. Over the years, ferries docked at various sites on both sides of the Intracoastal, including where Palm Harbor Marina is today in West Palm Beach and a site just south of the Flagler Memorial Bridge in Palm Beach. The ferries grew in popularity with more than one boat offering service. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
See more photos of the West Palm Beach-Palm Beach ferries here.
Tags: boats
On Sept. 23, 1696, during a trip from Jamaica to Philadelphia, the barkentine (three-masted ship) Reformation foundered off Jupiter Island. Quaker merchant Jonathan Dickinson, along with his wife, infant son, two associates and 10 slaves, made a grueling and perilous two-month trek to St. Augustine. Dickinson’s journal is the first detailed account of the region, describing Florida’s now vanished early Indian tribes.
The area of southern Martin County now known as Jonathan Dickinson State Park was a World War II training camp before it was turned over to the state to become a park named for the man whose journal is the only comprehensive first-hand description of those lost people.
Historical marker at Jonathan Dickinson State Park.
Reprint of the frontspiece of Dickinson’s journal
Tags: boats, parks, shipwrecks, This Week in History
