On Jan. 25, 1925, the Orange Blossom Special arrived in West Palm Beach for the grand opening of the Seaboard Air Line station, the flagship of the Seaboard line. The Mediterranean Revival station building, on Tamarind Avenue at Datura Street, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The Seaboard line was the second railroad to come to the area, after Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway.
Postcard from around 1939 with the caption “The Orange Blossom Special Going Througg Orange Groves in Florida.” (Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida)
Postcard from the 1920s of the Seaboard station in West Palm Beach. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
The Seaboard station in 1969 (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Tags: railroads, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
We’re starting our 12th year of Post Time. Thank you!
We’re reminded that history is about real people. On Jan. 16, 2005, we ran a feature on the slayings of two federal agents in West Palm Beach. We’d found relatives of Robert Moncure thanks to his surname, but not Frank Patterson. This past November, I received this email:
A week or so ago, while browsing the Internet, I discovered a copy of your article, dated January 16, 2005, and titled ‘75 Years Ago: Murder and Moonshine.’
While I am not sure what may have motivated you to write the article or the newspaper to publish, some 75 years after an event that most people might view as an insignificant bit of history, I wish to personally thank you and the paper for doing so. Otherwise, I might have never learned the details of the death of Frank Patterson, who was my grandfather.
After my grandmother moved to Tampa to raise her children, the details of those days were not often discussed by her. She died in the 1950s, while I was still a child, and growing up, all I learned from her children, my father, aunt and uncles, was that he died from a shotgun blast while attempting to serve a warrant during Prohibition. Even my Uncle James Patterson, who is Frank Patterson’s last surviving child and who is a retired schoolteacher living in California, knew very few details, other than that, as he was an infant at the time.
I have shared your article with my uncle, his daughter and my own children and grandchild, and they are also grateful for your efforts in researching and writing of those events so long ago.
You might find the following a bit ironical…A fact that I never knew was that I was born in 1951 on the anniversary of his Jan. 18 death. Likewise, the fact that, after I closed my real estate and civil law practice in Tampa, in 1986, I moved to Houston,where I have since practiced law exclusively as a criminal defense attorney — something my grandfather might have looked on with displeasure.
Thank you…for your efforts as they have reached across time and space and touched more hearts, in a positive way, than you could have imagined.
Richard Steven Patterson
Click on the image to read the Jan. 19, 1930 account of the shooting as published on the front page of The Palm Beach Post.
Tags: notorious crimes, Prohibition, West Palm Beach
On Nov. 30, 1955, the city of West Palm Beach sold a water bond issue to purchase the West Palm Beach Water Co. and its 17,000 acres of land for $8.5 million from the Henry Flagler estate. Flagler built the water plant at Clear Lake in 1894 when just a few hundred people lived in the area. By 1955 the water company served 15,700 households and businesses in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, and it currently provides water to 51,000 customers. Read more about the current state of the water facility here.
1919 “Map of the Property of the West Palm Beach Water Co.”
Tags: Henry Flagler, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
On Nov. 5, 1894, 87 of the town’s 500 or so residents gathered at the calaboose — the building that housed the jail and town hall — at Poinsettia Avenue (now Dixie Highway) and Banyan Street and voted to incorporate West Palm Beach. The area had originally been called Westpalmbeach, a single word, then split into three words. Founders rejected the name Flagler, even though Henry Flagler provided much of the infrastructure for the fledgling town, including land and money for churches, public buildings, and fire equipment for the Flagler Alerts, the volunteer fire department.
In 1896, after the city was ravaged by three major storms and two fires – one caused by a drunken tailor who tipped over an oil lamp – numerologists blamed the fledgling city’s woes on its name; it contained 13 letters.
The calaboose also was the site of the meeting that incorporated Palm Beach County on July 1, 1909. (Photo by Theodore Pratt, courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
The Palm Beach Post published a historical supplement on the occasion of the city’s 55th birthday in 1949. Included are photos of the early days of West Palm Beach, memories from residents, and features about notable pioneers.
Click on the images below to browse the pages from the Nov. 6, 1949 issue of The Palm Beach Post. And thanks to Ginger Pedersen for bringing the 1949 historical supplement to our attention.
Tags: incorporated, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
On Oct. 28, 1908, Carl Kettler opened the Bijou Theatre in the Jefferson building on Clematis Street. The opening feature was The Great Train Robbery. Kettler later moved the Bijou to Clematis and Narcissus streets and replaced it in 1924 with a new building known as the Kettler Theater.
The Bijou Theatre just before it was demolished to make way for the new Kettler Theater in July 1923. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Read more about the history of local theaters here.
Tags: theaters, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
