Last week we told you about early settler Joseph Lark Priest and the memoir his family has self-published. Here’s the rest:
By 1908, Priest, who’d lived at times in the Treasure and Space coasts and the Daytona Beach and St. Augustine areas, had moved from Fort Lauderdale to what’s now Delray Beach. The settlement, then just “Delray,” would not incorporate until 1912. (It’s marking its centennial this year.)
“Delray at the time had just a school, two churches, three grocery stores, one lumber yard, one large canning factory, a post office, a Masonic Lodge and Odd Fellow’s Lodge. Here we found the best people on earth,” Priest wrote in A Florida Pioneer, the Autobiography of Joseph Lark Priest.
Priest wrote that “the train ran regular,” but there was just one sand road, leading north and south, and traveling options were by foot or mule team.
He said mules then cost from $250 to $300 each, at a time when “money was very scarce, common labor one dollar and a quarter per day, carpenters two dollars and a half per day and not many jobs.”
But, he wrote, “It would be impossible for a man to be so lazy that he would starve in Florida. If he will work he can raise anything he wants to eat. If he won’t work he can catch fish, he can get oysters and clams, he can kill rabbits, he can catch coons and opossums, he can cut palmetto cabbage.”
The nearest source of “fire water” was West Palm Beach, an 18-mile trip costing 60 cents on the train. Once, Priest said, he and pioneer John Shaw Sundy went to West Palm Beach by mule; the trip took five hours each way.
Writing his memoir late in life, and with the Depression settled in, Lark said, “Florida has many knockers, mostly by northern papers, but Florida will come. It will take a little time but it is coming. The boom come and went but Florida is coming to stay.”
Priest worked a while as tender of the Atlantic Avenue bridge. He and his wife are buried at the old section of the Delray Beach cemetery. Florida, of course, did come to stay, and it now sports more than 18 million people. “Delray,” now 100, holds about 64,000. Joseph wouldn’t recognize the place.
Tags: Delray Beach, pioneers
The town of Delray was incorporated on Oct. 9th, 1911. In 1923, the town of Delray Beach, encompassing the barrier island east of the Intracoastal, was incorporated. Four years later, on May 11, 1927, the two towns united into the city of Delray Beach.
In 1973 The Palm Beach Post-Times ran a story featuring historic photos collected by the Delray Beach Historical Society. Reprints of vintage photographs are still available for purchase from the historical society archives.
The Cromer Building on the southwest corner of Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Avenue housed the Bank of Delray. It was the city’s first concrete structure. Bicycles and horse-drawn carriages were the main means of transportation when this shot was taken in the early 1900s. (Courtesy Delray Beach Historical Society)
Atlantic Avenue west of the railroad tracks in 1900. (Courtesy Delray Beach Historical Society)
Tags: Delray Beach, incorporated, This Week in History
On Oct. 4, 1982, Delray Community Hospital (renamed Delray Medical Center in 1996) admitted its first patients. The hospital opened with 160 beds and has since expanded to become a 493-bed acute care hospital on a 42-acre medical center campus.
Delray Community Hospital was under construction when this photo was taken in July 1982. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: Delray Beach, hospitals, This Week in History
On Sept. 11, 1903, before hurricanes were named and tracked by forecasters, a powerful storm made landfall near Fort Lauderdale as the 386-foot Inchulva was steaming off the coast of Delray Beach, then a settlement of about 150 people. Nine crew members drowned when the ship ran aground 200 yards offshore. The ship broke into five distinct pieces that make up a popular snorkeling and dive site 25 feet below the surface off the south end of the municipal beach. Because of constantly shifting sand, different parts are exposed at different times. A map showing the location of the pieces of the wreck is here.
The Delray Beach Historical Society commemorated the 100th year anniversary of the Inchulva wreck in 2003, with an exhibit of photographs, paperwork, and pieces of the wreckage. Items from the exhibit are shown here: a photo of the ship’s engineer, William Smith, and a section of the ship that had been used to lower life boats into the water. (2003 Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
The Delray Wreck historical marker
Tags: Delray Beach, shipwrecks, This Week in History
Delray Beach will mark its centennial Oct. 9, the official incorporation date. Look for plenty of fun events next month.
A meeting “for the purpose of discussing the advisability of incorporating” occurred a century ago, Sept. 4, 1911. It was at the Ladies Improvement Association Hall in what then was the settlement of Linton.
A month later, on Oct. 9, 57 “qualified electors” voted almost unanimously — one ballot was tossed — to create the new municipality of “Delray,” west of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Maj. Nathan Smith Boynton, U.S. Congressman William Seelyn Linton and David Swinton had come from Michigan in 1895.
Boynton was a retired Civil War major and former mayor of Port Huron, Mich.; Linton, postmaster of Saginaw, Mich., and a congressman; and Swinton, a Saginaw bookstore owner.
In West Palm Beach, they heard of land for sale to the south. By 1895, Linton had brought down 10 settlers. After they were hit by a freeze and Linton defaulted on land payments, settlers decided Linton reminded them of struggle and chose a different namesake.
Delray was a neighborhood in Detroit that was itself named for the Mexican town of Del Rey, translated as “of the king.” At the October 1911 meeting, John S. Sundy (pictured above) was elected mayor with 53 votes. He served seven terms.
A construction superintendent for the Florida East Coast Railway, he had stepped off a southbound train in 1898. When Henry Flagler told him, “There’s nothing here,” he replied, “There will be.”
Also at the incorporation meeting was George H. Green (pictured above), one of 10 people nominated for five aldermen’s positions, coming in seventh. Notable about that was that Green was black, in Florida, where in the early 20th century, few blacks even were allowed to vote. In fact, 11 of Delray’s 57 electors were African-American.
In 1923, the town of Delray Beach, encompassing residents on the barrier island east of the Intracoastal, was incorporated. Four years later, on May 11, 1927, the two towns merged.
The Delray Beach centennial web page is delray100.com.
Read the minutes of Delray Beach’s incorporation meeting here.
Miller and Son’s First Bicycle and Barber Shop in Delray, circa 1912. Left to right: two unknown customers, Albert L. Miller, Mary (Clutter) Miller and Albert F. Miller. The photo was taken near the location of the old Arcade Tap Room, now Gol! The Taste of Brazil on Atlantic Avenue. (Photo courtesy of Delray Beach Historical Society)
Tags: Delray Beach, incorporated, place names
