Florida still restricts land ownership by immigrants ineligible for citizenship

The catastrophic earthquake in March has brought focus on Japan and its grieving compatriots here in America, and South Florida. In February, this reporter took his in-laws, visiting from Indiana, to the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens near Delray Beach.

The Yamato-kan, the original museum building, which had opened in 1977, now includes an exhibit about the colony. It mentions that a 1926 constitutional amendment, which would give the legislature the right to ban land ownership by aliens ineligible for citizenship, “is still in effect today.”

Well, didn’t a 2008 constitutional amendment take care of that? Whoops. No. Amendment 1 failed, 48 to 52 percent.

Here are excerpts of a piece our Tallahassee colleague, Dara Kam, wrote in advance of the 2008 vote:

The Florida legislature added the “alien land law” to the state constitution in 1926, restricting the ownership of property by immigrants ineligible for citizenship. Florida is the only state with such a constitutional provision.

Federal law then granted naturalized citizenship only to whites and to blacks of African descent.

The legislature never passed any laws under the provision and could not anyway, experts said, because it violates the U.S. Constitution by discriminating by race.

Sponsors said taking the 23 words out of the state constitution would be symbolic similar to removing laws allowing slavery.

Proponents feared confused voters would think the question covers illegal aliens or terrorists. Asian-American civil rights organizations were mum on the amendment, and even national experts on the topic of alien land laws were unaware that it was on the ballot, fueling worries that it might not pass — which it didn’t.

Morikami, of course, had its start in the short-lived Yamato Colony, founded at the turn of the 20th century in Boca Raton. Starting in 1974, former colonist and naturalized U.S. citizen George Morikami (pictured above) donated nearly 200 acres to Palm Beach County for the museum that bears his name.

Special thanks to Morikami cultural director Tom Gregerson.

The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens near Delray Beach has an exhibit about the short-lived Yamato Colony. It was founded at the turn of the 20th century in Boca Raton. Starting in 1974, former colonist George Morikami donated nearly 200 acres to Palm Beach County for the museum that bears his name. (Courtesy of the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens)

Readers: Our April 14 column said Cap Dimick misspelled the Palm Beach road as Chilian Avenue “and it’s still spelled that way.” Post staff researcher Michelle Quigley reminds us the town council voted in 2003 to change it to the proper Chilean.

Tags: Delray Beach, immigrants, museums

German immigrant may have been Palm Beach County’s first resident

Question: Who was the first resident of what’s now Palm Beach County?

Answer: The leading candidate is a mysterious hermit named Augustus Oswald Lang. We know the German immigrant was here as early as the 1860s, having moved from Fort Pierce, perhaps to avoid being drafted into the Confederate army.

Palm Beach Inlet, also called Lake Worth Inlet, was originally named Lang’s Inlet. He’d dug a narrow trench through the beach ridge in the early 1860s that lowered the lake to sea level.

Lang then got a job as assistant keeper of the Jupiter Lighthouse.

On Aug. 15, 1861, the 30-year old, backed by other Confederate loyalists, ordered his boss, J.F. Papy, to surrender the lighting mechanism to the house, built in 1860 on what was then Confederate soil.

The idea was to stymie Union ships pursuing blockade runners, who already knew the coast.

Papy, loyal to his federal paycheck and his mission to keep boaters safe, said no, but was finally pressured into relinquishing the light mechanism.

Because it was so valuable, Lang and his cohorts didn’t destroy it; they just hid it. On June 28, 1866, the lighthouse was relighted, and except for hurricanes and a brief electrical problem in the late 1980s, it didn’t go dark again until a 1999 renovation.

Lang eventually enlisted in the Confederate army in January 1862 but deserted a year and a half later. In 1866, two settlers from what’s now Miami found him living in what’s today Palm Beach.

Lang moved around 1867 to the North Fork of the St. Lucie River, where he worked with plants and raised hogs and cows.

He later married the 15-year-old daughter of the only other family in the area. But two months before his only child was born, three men showed up, asking him to take them up the river to find their runaway horses. Once they rounded the bend, they shot Lang dead. His body never was found.

One of the killers later was shot. The other two confessed to stuffing his corpse in an alligator crawl. He said the three had planned to use Lang’s cleared property for their cattle.

Update: Our Aug. 12 column on Pearl City prompted West Palm Beach real estate broker Linda Cullen to plan a visit. But she couldn’t find the roads on a map. Boca Raton Historical Society archivist Sue Gillis to the rescue: Sapphire is Northeast 10th Street. Ruby is Northeast 11th Street. Pearl is Northeast 12th Street east of Dixie Highway and west of Federal Highway. Thanks, Sue. Linda reports the streets show both names.

Sources: Palm Beach Post archives and James D. Snyder’s “A Light in the Wilderness.”

Augustus Oswald Lang (Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Jupiter Lighthouse circa 1879. Lang, worked at the lighthouse during the Civil War. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Tags: Civil War, firsts, immigrants, Jupiter

Butterfly Ballot Doesn’t Crack Area’s Top 10

This is our 500th column since Post Time began Jan. 19, 2000.

Special thanks go to recently retired Managing Editor Bill Rose, who had the idea, and Neighborhood Post editor Tom Peeling, who’s shepherded all 500 columns, along with all the copy editors who caught my mistakes.

But we couldn’t do it without your interest. Keep the questions coming! To honor the moment, we’re running an updated version of a list we compiled in 1999 of the 25 top events. Several state and local historians volunteered to rank them. The list was revised with help from Bill McGoun, retired Post editorial writer and author of Southeast Florida Pioneers.

Here’s 25 through 11:

25. Dairy industry bought out, 1980s-1990s.

24. Scandals send three county commissioners and two West Palm Beach commissioners and alleged accomplices to prison.

23. Proposed U.S. Sugar deal would restore sugar fields to Everglades (2009).

22. Downtown revitalized, 1980s-2000s.

21. 1980s spark increased growth.

20. Interstate 95 missing link completed through region, 1987.

19. Florida Atlantic University founded, 1964.

18. Civil War, 1861-65; Jupiter Lighthouse darkened to help blockade runners.

17. Battles of Okeechobee, Jupiter help push Seminoles into Everglades, 1837-38.

16. Region struggles through integration woes, late 1960s-early ’70s.

15. Refugees from Latin America and Caribbean change region’s demographics, 1960s-90s.

14. Jonathan Dickinson chronicles Indian groups now extinct, 1696.

13. Anthrax attack starts in Boca Raton; local aspects of Sept. 11.

12. IBM, Pratt & Whitney and others bring high-tech industry to Florida, 1950s-’60s.

11. 2000 election and Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot change presidential election.

Palm Beach Post file photo: Visitors examine some of the super engines built by Pratt & Whitney in northern Palm Beach County during an open house in 1978. Pratt and IBM, which was in southern Palm Beach County, brought the high-tech industry to Florida in the 1950s-’60s and provided thousands of jobs.”

Tags: agriculture, Civil War, economy, immigrants, notorious crimes, schools

1947: Refugees from Estonia land at the Port of Palm Beach

On October 26, 1947, twenty-four Latvian and Estonian refugees landed at the Port of Palm Beach in a 55-foot boat. The six children, five women and 13 men were “suprisingly healthy and clean” after the 56-day voyage through two hurricanes and an electrical storm that one of the crew said was “something like I have never seen.” The Svea Malmon was the fifth such boat to land in Florida since 1946. After the first Estonian refugee boats braved the Atlantic crossing in order to escape Russian tyranny, President Truman issued a statement directing that “all avenues be explored” to allow the refugees to become citizens, saying also “this is the type of pioneering spirit that built this Nation.”

Tags: boats, immigrants

German Farmers Populated Early Delray

Readers: Heidi Aspen Rhoades of Boca Raton asks the name origin of Old Germantown Road in Delray Beach.
The road winds from Congress Avenue and meets Linton Boulevard nearly at Military Trail.

It’s on virtually everything sold by Office Depot; the office supply giant’s headquarters, until their recent move to adjacent Boca Raton, was on Old Germantown Road.

We know there’s a Germantown in Memphis, Tenn., and of course many communities across the country had German immigrant communities.

And we know of the Lantana area’s longtime Finnish community and the short-lived Japanese farm colony in Boca Raton for which Yamato Road is named. But Germans?

We ran our question past Dottie Patterson, archivist for the Delray Beach Historical Society.

“This is sort of a guess. Perhaps somewhere there is a more official version,” she writes.

“When I was studying the 1910 (first) Delray census for a Delray Beach Library panel on diversity, I saw that the foreign country most often named by people of European descent as a country of origin for themselves or parents was Germany.

“Of course we already knew that there was a group of German pioneers in Delray. One of the early churches was the Lutheran Church — first called by the name in German –and a German school for the children, and the story that the only mule in town only took commands in German, etc.

“When taking some oral histories, people told me that families in town sometimes had a house out where the fields were also, and they stayed there during harvest and planting times.

“Therefore, I guessed that some of the German families had cottages in the area of Germantown Road. A large percentage of the people on the 1910 census listed their occupation as farming.”

Thanks as always, Dottie. Perhaps a reader can provide even more illumination!

Readers: Our April 30 column on the creation of Palm Beach County described Guy Metcalf as the county’s first schools superintendent. He held that post about 1917. Susan Harris, part of the J.C. Harris family, as in the downtown West Palm Beach store — in business since 1903 and on Clematis since 1913– called to correct us. Store founder J.C. Harris was the first superintendent of public instruction.

Photo: Special to Neighborhood Post
Early Delray had many farmers and many of them were German. This old photo shows a vegetable packing house in Delray Beach.

Tags: agriculture, Delray Beach, immigrants, place names