Think back, to a time before Ft. Lauderdale was the world’s cruise ship capital and the epitome of spring-break cool. Back before freeways. Before air conditioning. Back even before 1838, when the town’s first “tourist” — Maj. William Lauderdale – threw up a hastily-built fort beside the Rio Nuevo, hanging around for only a month or so, but leaving his name behind.
Pick up any short history of Ft. Lauderdale, and after a brief nod to the area’s native inhabitants, the account will likely start off in 1893, when enterprising Frank Stranahan launched his ferry business across the New River, soon adding an all-in-one hotel slash bank, post office, and trading post. (A building that, not coincidentally, tourists can still see today.)
But even before Stranahan – and a good two centuries before freeway jams, air-conditioned comfort, and jet-lagged tourists — a handful of hard-working settlers sank their fingers and their fortunes in the sandy soil we now call Ft. Lauderdale. And sadly, much of their stories have been forgotten.
Here, then, are the surprising tales of three early New River settlers – largely unsung pioneers whose grit and hard work helped lay the foundation for today’s bustling Ft. Lauderdale.
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It was 1789 when British Bahamian Surles Lewis and his wife, Frankee, stepped off their sailboat at the forks of the New River, determined to start a farm with their three sons. It wouldn’t be easy; clearing away the dense canopy of palmetto, shrubs, and hardwoods was back-breaking work, not to mention the perpetual annoyance of mosquitoes, black flies, and midges.
Four years after the Lewis’s arrival, Captain Joseph Robbins and his family joined the farming effort at New River. Together, the two families raised citrus, coconut, and guava, shipping their produce back to the Bahamas for sell or trade, and supplementing their meager income with fishing and hunting.
They had some native company nearby, of course. Only about 80 of the original Tequesta Indians remained in the vicinity; many had fled to the Keys or to Cuba over the previous decades, after the British acquired Florida in 1763. But members of other tribes, pushed from their homelands in the north by European colonists, had begun drifting into the wilderness of south Florida. These would eventually be collectively known as Seminoles, or “runaways.”
Roughly six years before the Lewises began their farming adventure, Florida had reverted to Spanish control. So when word trickled back to de Quesada, Spain’s colonial governor at St. Augustine, that British subjects had started a farm at New River, he was anything but happy. Spain had already lost Florida once to Great Britain; they didn’t want that humiliation again. In addition, Spanish authority in the colony was being tested by upstarts like William Augustus Bowles, whose motley crew of “pirates and rogues” had been wreaking havoc all across Florida, even attacking a trading post near St. Augustine in 1788. Could this small farm at New River be a toe-hold for Bowles or other anti-Spanish forces?
De Quesada sent out a crew of undercover associates with a trading schooner to check out this concerning development. Posing as ordinary merchants headed for Cuba, and pretending to be out of fresh drinking water, the crew sailed into New River on March 6, 1793 on their covert mission to investigate Lewis’s settlement. As luck would have it, Surles Lewis himself wasn’t there; he was off on a trading trip to the Bahamas. But the newcomers were given a cordial welcome by Joseph Robbins. His hospitable wife even cooked them up a dinner of fresh-caught trout.
The Spanish spies hung around the Lewis farm for two days, refilled their deliberately-emptied water casks, then pretended to sail south for Havana before reversing course once they were out of sight and boogeying back to St. Augustine. Their meticulous reports identified nothing suspicious about the Lewis settlement, beyond a house on the south side of the river and a blacksmith’s shop capable of producing harpoons. The entire settlement, they noted, amounted to just ten settlers. Even so, de Quesada was spooked.
The Spanish governor fired off a letter to his superior in Havana, suggesting putting a price on the interlopers’s heads to induce Indians to capture the settlers and ferry them off to prison. But Spanish authorities were juggling more-pressing global worries at the moment, including international frictions with France. And De Quesada himself wasn’t around much longer to pursue the issue; he soon retired. So the Lewises – likely oblivious as the whole drama unfolded — continued to farm at New River in peace.
In 1819, thirty years after the Lewises had launched their New River farm, patriarch Surles and one son drowned when their ship was caught in a hurricane while on a trading voyage to the Bahamas. With the assistance of Key West attorney and land speculator Richard Fitzpatrick, widow Frankee Lewis filed for a Spanish land claim on her family farm. Surprisingly enough, Spain approved her claim.
But the good news was short-lived. International affairs soon muddied her title. In 1821, Florida became a territory of the United States. Spanish land grants like Frankee’s had to be adjudicated all over again. All of that paperwork took a while – and required legal help. Finally, on the very last day of December, 1825, Frankee’s claim was formally recognized by the U.S. Land Commission. For Frankee, the news must have come as the best possible belated Christmas present. Formally designated the “Frankee Lewis Donation,” the 640-acre tract spanned a large part of what’s now downtown Ft. Lauderdale.
By 1830, four decades had elapsed since the Lewis family first set foot at Rio Nuevo. Frankee had watched her family’s tiny settlement grow from a handful of souls to a town of sixty people. That September, she finally said good-bye, selling her property to her Key West attorney, Richard Fitzpatrick, for $400. But she didn’t move very far. Her two remaining sons had settled near the Miami River. Frankee went south to live with them.
Fitzpatrick spun grand plans for a plantation at the New River site. But that ambitious endeavor didn’t last long. His plantation was burned to the ground by Indians in 1836, a casualty of the Second Seminole War. And that became the precipitating reason for the name of today’s metropolis.
Anxious to quell local unrest, the military sent Maj. William Lauderdale to New River in 1838 to establish a fort. The site he chose? The burned-out plantation. The land was already cleared, after all. And it was a perfect spot for a fort, on the high ground overlooking the fork in the New River.
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Coming next in tales of early Ft. Lauderdale: the stories of Isaiah Hall, rescued by a Union gunboat after he was run out of Miami in 1863; and Pig Brown, a beachcomber, wrecker, and pig grower who won a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and then “disappeared.” Read it here!