History
"Boca Raton" can be loosely defined as "Mouth of the Rat" or "Rat's Mouth" (In Spanish "boca" is mouth and "raton" is "mouse" and sometimes referred as "rat"). However, in nautical terms the word "boca" refers to an inlet. The original name "Boca de Ratones" appeared on eighteenth century maps associated with an inlet in the Biscayne Bay area of Miami. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term was mistakenly moved north to its current location on most maps and applied to the inland waterway from the closed inlet north for 8.5 miles (13.7 km), which was called the "Boca Ratones Lagoon". The word "ratones" appears in old Spanish maritime dictionaries referring to "rugged rocks or stony ground on the bottom of some ports and coastal outlets, where the cables rub against". Therefore the abridged translation defining "Boca de Ratones" is "a shallow inlet of sharp-pointed rocks which scrapes a ship's cables". The first settler was T. M. Rickards in 1895 who resided in a house made of driftwood on the east side of the East Coast Canal south of what is now the Palmetto Park Road bridge. He surveyed and sold land from the canal to beyond the railroad north of what is now Palmetto Park Road.
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