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Here in South Florida, where businesses brag if they’ve been around a whole 20 years, and transplants presume the region’s history began around the time Walt Disney World opened, the year 1887, 125 years ago, is downright ancient.
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. ”
Tags: Palm Beach, place names, shipwrecks
On Jan. 9, 1878, the Spanish brig Providencia bound from Mexico to Spain with a cargo of logs, hides and 20,000 coconuts ran aground on what was then known at the lake region. Local residents took the coconuts as salvage and within a decade, the area was filled with palm trees, and the island had a new name — Palm Beach.
Tags: Palm Beach, place names, shipwrecks, This Week in History
On Dec. 29, 1926 the Breakers hotel reopened with the now-familiar twin-towered facade inspired by the famed Villa Medici in Rome. A fire caused by a curling iron destroyed the hotel in March 1925. That wasn’t the first time the hotel was destroyed by fire. It had been rebuilt after a 1903 fire thought to have been caused by a plumber’s torch burned the hotel to the ground.
The Breakers hotel on fire, March 18, 1925 (Photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida)
The entrance to the Breakers after it was rebuilt in 1926 (Photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida)
The Breakers entrance today (Palm Beach Daily News file photo)
Tags: fire, hotels, Palm Beach, This Week in History
Last week, we told you about retired postal worker Richard Paul Pavlick’s plot to murder president-elect John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach in December 1960.
Pavlick had driven to Florida with the idea of ramming JFK’s motorcade as it headed for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church.
He’d aborted one attempt after seeing Kennedy’s wife and two small children.
Authorities following a tip had been watching for the 1950 Buick with New Hampshire plates.
Lester Free, an officer with the Palm Beach police, spotted it on the North Bridge at 9 p.m. Dec. 15, and fellow officers, along with Secret Service agents, swarmed it and pulled Pavlick out.
It turned out the “grandfatherly type” with white hair had filled his trunk with seven sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A Secret Service photo (below) shows the Buick and its deadly cargo.
Photo provided by Secret Service
Pavlick had three more sticks and more detonating equipment in his motel room.
“He talked very rationally. He had it all planned. I’m certain he was capable of doing it,” Free told The Palm Beach Times in 1972.
Free later would leave Palm Beach to become part of a four-man force in Juno Beach.
Pavlick had been convinced the Kennedy family had bought the election, and in his car was a letter to the American people, saying in part, “I decided that never would the presidency of the United States be up for sale.”
Pavlick later was found incompetent to face charges and was sent to a medical center in Missouri. He bounced around psychiatric hospitals for six years until charges eventually were dropped.
By then, another man, Lee Harvey Oswald, had accomplished from the window of a Dallas schoolbook warehouse what Pavlick had failed to do.
In the 1970s, Pavlick still was sending dozens of letters proclaiming his innocence to everyone from the White House to Congress to the media. Pavlick died at 88 in 1975 in a veterans’ hospital in Manchester, N.H. He’d outlived by three years Lester Free, the police officer who’d saved the life of a president.
Read more about the incident in an article by Stuart writer Alice L. Luckhardt in the October 2010 edition of Florida Monthly Magazine.
Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents
Two years from this week, expect an avalanche of news coverage. It will be 50 years since that day in Dallas when a young president died and a country lost its innocence.
Far less known: A man tried to kill John F. Kennedy in 1960, just weeks after he even was elected and before he even was sworn in. And it happened right in Palm Beach.
While the “woulda-coulda-shoulda” of Kennedy’s assassination has been picked apart more than probably any murder in American history, smart police work — and the providential appearance of JFK’s family — averted tragedy in 1960. Or at least postponed it.
On Sunday, Dec. 11, 73-year-old Richard Paul Pavlick sat in his 1950 Buick across from the Kennedys’ Palm Beach home. The retired postal worker was violently anti-Catholic and believed that the Kennedy family had bought the election.
Pavlick’s plan: Wait for Kennedy to leave for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church, then ram the presidential car. Inside Pavlick’s Buick: seven sticks of dynamite.
But then Jackie Kennedy came to the door, along with Caroline, 4, and “John-John,” all of 16 days old, to see the president-elect off.
“I did not wish to harm her or the children,” Pavlick (above) would say later. He decided to wait for a better opportunity.
He didn’t get one. Pavlick had sold his Belmont, N.H., home and had made one trip to case the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. But he also had let slip his plans to a Postal Service colleague, who told authorities.
The Secret Service posted a bulletin describing Pavlick and saying he might have explosives.
So four days after Pavlick’s almost attack, at 9 p.m., Palm Beach patrolman Lester Free (above) spotted the Buick crossing from West Palm Beach on the North Bridge. He stopped it at Royal Poinciana Way and North County Road. In seconds, Palm Beach officers and Secret Service agents had surrounded the car and one had pulled Pavlick out.
“We hit the grass,” former patrolman Nick Mancino recalled in a 1983 Palm Beach Post story. “I didn’t know what was in that car, but my reaction was that it was going to go, ‘Boom!’ ”
NEXT WEEK: He had it all planned.
On Dec. 15, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy and Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, hold a news conference at what would become known as the ‘Winter White House’ in Palm Beach. (Photo by Mort Kaye Studios)
Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents
