On Oct. 10, 2006 voters in the rural community of Loxahatchee Groves approved incorporation by a vote of 458 to 350. Founded in 1917, Loxahatchee Groves is the oldest of the western communities and gets its name from the Seminole words for turtle river — Lowchow and hatchee — and the acres of citrus groves that occupied the land prior to settlement.
Tags: incorporated, This Week in History
On Oct. 1, 1931 the city of Clewiston was incorporated, but not for the first time. Clewiston had been incorporated in 1923, and then re-chartered in 1925. The city was named for early settler Alonzo Clewis, a Tampa banker who purchased a large tract of land southwest of Lake Okeechobee in the area then known as Sand Point.
In 1920 Clewis and Clewiston developers John and Marion O’Brien commissioned nationally known planner John Nolen to create a plan for the city.
1926 ad from the Miami News:
1938 Miami News feature on “The Glades District”:
Tags: Glades, incorporated, This Week in History
The Palm Beach County Clerk & Comptroller is (among other things) the official keeper of the minutes of county commission meetings. On a recent tour of the office we took some photos of the minutes book from the very first Palm Beach County Commission meeting on July 5, 1909. Click on the images below to view larger versions (and click again to zoom in enough to read them).
Tags: incorporated, Palm Beach County
Twenty-two families lived in the town of Hypoluxo when it was incorporated on July 4, 1955. The name comes from the Seminole term for “water all around, no get out,” from the days when Lake Worth was a freshwater lake with no permanent inlet to the ocean.
The caption on this photograph in the Nov. 13, 1964 Palm Beach Post: “Hypoluxo’s slogan, ‘The Town with No Taxes,’ may have to be altered if the town installs a sewage system. Town officials have been conferring with Lantana authorities about a tie-in with that community’s sewage system. But, a always, there is the matter of financing. Maybe an assessment would also provide footwear for the poor shoeless mailman.”
This Jan. 14, 1925 ad in The Palm Beach Post touts the appeal of Hypoluxo Island. The island area is not part of the town.
Tags: incorporated, This Week in History
Until it was sold to developers in 1958, most of what is now the city of Atlantis was a cattle ranch, citrus grove and chicken farm known as Mulberry Farms. Atlantis, named for the lost city of mythology, was incorporated on June 19, 1959, as one of the first country club communities in Palm Beach County.
Jackie Gleason and Whitey Ford golf in Atlantis in 1961. (Palm Beach Post file photo courtesy of Sara Ann Kintz)
Tags: incorporated, This Week in History
