Draining and Development of The Everglades - Boom and Plume Harvesting

Boom and Plume Harvesting

Further information: Florida land boom of the 1920s

Real estate companies continued to advertise and sell land along newly dug canals. In April 1912—the end of the dry season—reporters from all over the U.S. were given a tour of what had recently been drained, and they returned to their papers and raved about the progress. Land developers sold 20,000 lots in a few months. But as news about the Wright report continued to be negative, land values plummeted, and sales decreased. Developers were sued and arrested for mail fraud when people who had spent their life savings to buy land arrived in south Florida expecting to find a dry parcel of land to build upon and instead found it completely underwater. Advertisements promised land that would yield crops in eight weeks, but for many it took at least as long just to clear. Some burned off the sawgrass or other vegetation only to discover that the underlying peat continued to burn. Animals and tractors used for plowing got mired in the muck and were useless. When the muck dried, it turned to a fine black powder and created dust storms. Settlers encountered rodents, skinks, and biting insects, and faced dangers from mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and alligators. Though at first crops sprouted quickly and lushly, they just as quickly wilted and died, seemingly without reason. It was discovered later that the peat and muck lacked copper and other trace elements. The USDA released a pamphlet in 1915 that declared land along the New River Canal would be too costly to keep drained and fertilized; people in Ft. Lauderdale responded by collecting all of the pamphlets and burning them.

With the increasing population in towns near the Everglades came hunting opportunities. Even decades earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe had been horrified at the hunting by visitors, and she wrote the first conservation publication for Florida in 1877: "he decks of boats are crowded with men, whose only feeling amid our magnificent forests, seems to be a wild desire to shoot something and who fire at every living thing on shore." Otters and raccoons were the most widely hunted for their skins. Otter pelts could fetch between $8 and $15 each. Raccoons, more plentiful, only warranted 75 cents each in 1915. Hunting often went unchecked; on one trip, a Lake Okeechobee hunter killed 250 alligators and 172 otters.

Wading birds were a particular target. Their feathers were used in women's hats from the late 19th century until the 1920s. In 1886, five million birds were estimated to have been killed for their feathers. They were usually shot in the spring, when their feathers were colored for mating and nesting. Aigrettes, as the plumes were called in the millinery business, sold in 1915 for $32 an ounce, also the price of gold. Millinery was a $17-million-a-year industry that motivated plume harvesters to lie in wait at the nests of egrets and other large birds during the nesting season, shoot the parents with small-bore rifles, and leave the chicks to starve. Many hunters refused to participate after watching the gruesome results of a plume hunt. Still, plumes from Everglades wading birds could be found in Havana, New York City, London, and Paris. A dealer in New York paid at least 60 hunters to provide him with "almost anything that wore feathers, but particularly the Herons, Spoonbills, and showy birds". Hunters could collect plumes from a hundred birds on a good day.

Plume harvesting became a dangerous business. The Audubon Society became concerned with the amount of hunting being done in rookeries in the mangrove forests. In 1902, they hired a warden, Guy Bradley, to watch the rookeries around Cuthbert Lake. Bradley had lived in Flamingo within the Everglades, and was murdered in 1905 by one of his neighbors after he tried to prevent him from hunting. Protection of birds was the reason for establishing the first wildlife refuge when President Theodore Roosevelt set Pelican Island as a sanctuary in 1903.

In the 1920s, after birds were protected and alligators hunted nearly to extinction, Prohibition created a living for those willing to smuggle alcohol into the U.S. from Cuba. Rum-runners used the vast Everglades as a hiding spot: there were never enough law enforcement officers to patrol it. The advent of the fishing industry, the arrival of the railroad, and the discovery of the benefits of adding copper to Okeechobee muck soon created unprecedented numbers of residents in new towns like Moore Haven, Clewiston, and Belle Glade. By 1921, 2,000 people lived in 16 new towns around Lake Okeechobee. Sugarcane became the primary crop grown in south Florida and it began to be mass-produced. Miami experienced a second real estate boom that earned a developer in Coral Gables $150 million and saw undeveloped land north of Miami sell for $30,600 an acre. Miami became cosmopolitan and experienced a renaissance of architecture and culture. Hollywood movie stars vacationed in the area and industrialists built lavish homes. Miami's population multiplied fivefold, and Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach grew many times over as well. In 1925, Miami newspapers published editions weighing over 7 pounds (3.2 kg), most of it real estate advertising. Waterfront property was the most highly valued. Mangrove trees were cut down and replaced with palm trees to improve the view. Acres of south Florida slash pine were taken down, some for lumber, but the wood was found to be dense and it split apart when nails were driven into it. It was also termite-resistant, but homes were needed quickly. Most of the pine forests in Dade County were cleared for development.