The 125th Birthday of the City of Miami

There are as many rumors, fables, fairy tales and as much complete folderol dealing with Miami and its unquestionably illustrious history as there are true, factual and often unbelievable stories of the city and its incredible past. A history which – through good times and bad – was for the most part a beacon of hope and refuge for the forlorn, the downtrodden and, yes, often for the hopeless.

Was it always the “Magic City?” No, not always, but, indeed, the aura surrounding what is today truly one of the world’s great cities remains as magical as it was beginning in and with our town’s earliest days.

While Miami was founded on July 28, 1896, several items regarding its coming into existence are still shrouded in mystery, not the least of those being exactly how many people then living in the frontier village actually voted in favor of incorporation.

First, it should be noted that while Miami suffered through the vile and shameful years of segregation and Jim Crow – like every other city in the South– a number of Black men were actually recruited to vote in favor, which they did. Thus, Miami became a city without ever having first been a town or village. The question, though, is how many people actually voted that day. The answer is … we really don’t know.

“How could that be?” one may ask, and the explanation is actually fairly simple: Documented records show either 343, 345 or 347 males voted that day, the majority of them favoring the unincorporated area becoming a city, which it did on that day.

Coconut Grove, founded as much by Bahamians as by whites, already existed, at least in name, when Miami came into existence. In fact, it was not too long after Miami’s birth that “the Grove” was separately incorporated and remained the Village of Coconut Grove until – under a now thankfully sunset state law – it was subsumed by and became part and parcel of Miami.

Part of the hubris of Miami’s origination has for many years revolved around a sole woman being “the mother of Miami” and, while simply put and not meaning to push readers into paroxysms of either anguish or hysteria, there was more than one.

Along with Julia Tuttle, Mary Brickell equally deserves that honorarium. For the edification of local historians, she and her husband offered land to the great Henry Plant, builder of railroads in central Florida and on the state’s west coast, as well as to Henry Flagler – several years before Tuttle did. The extension of the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) from West Palm Beach, which reached Miami (“Myamuh” as the old-timers pronounced it) was due not just to the efforts of the two women, but also to the work of Flagler’s land commissioner, James Ingraham, for whom the Ingraham Building in downtown Miami is named.

It was Ingraham who made the deals with Dade County (which at the time extended up to and included today’s Martin County) and the state to grant alternate sections (a section is 640 acres) on each side of the railroad as track was constructed further and further south.

1896 was one of the two most important years in Miami history. On Feb. 22, Isidor Cohen, the first permanent Jewish settler to arrive on the shores of Biscayne Bay, reached Lemon City by boat, thence by horse-drawn buckboard to what would eventually become downtown Miami. On April 15, the first train – a construction engineers train – arrived, with the first passenger train arriving a week later on April 22. The first excursion train from the north (Jacksonville) came to a stop on May 11.

Four days later, on May 15, the inaugural issue of Miami’s first newspaper, the Metropolis, was printed and distributed. On July 28 the city sprang into existence. Finally, on Dec. 31, Flagler’s grand Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the Miami River was opened with a gala New Year’s Eve ball. 1896 was indeed an auspicious start for a fledgling municipality.

By 1909, publicists for the FEC had coined the nickname for Miami as the “Magic City,” and it certainly was that, with FEC promotional material showing the sun shining down with the tagline, “The East Coast of Florida is Paradise Regained.” And for the people who, thanks to that railroad, came south from northern climes, it was – as it continues to be for so many today – paradise regained.

As the years went on Miami grew, and its offshoots – including Homestead (the second incorporated municipality in Dade County), Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Hialeah and others – became bedroom, resort and/or business communities. The entire area’s national reputation brought unending growth until the occurrence of several terrible events in 1926.

By the end of 1925, the Roaring ’20s were doing just that, and Florida was in the greatest boom period in its history. But the brakes would soon be applied.

It started in January 1926, when the four-masted Danish schooner the Prinz Valdemar capsized in the turning basin of Miami’s harbor, blocking all waterborne traffic from entering the city’s docks, then on the east side of Biscayne Boulevard from 5th to 13th Streets. Other cataclysmic events followed, culminating with the horrific “Great Miami Hurricane” Sept. 17-18, which killed more than 600 people. These events would prove to be harbingers of the Great Depression, which would begin just a little more than three years later and affect not just the entire country, but most of the world.

Recovery was slow, but by early 1940 the national economy was turning around. Then came America’s entry into World War II.

While Miami Beach was recognized as the No. 1 training ground for the U.S. Army Air Forces during the war, there is a tendency to overlook Miami’s importance. Between several suburban air bases, Miami itself was both the Navy’s and the Coast Guard’s South Atlantic Command headquarters, located in downtown’s Alfred I. DuPont Building, covering an immense area from the mid-Atlantic to and including the Caribbean and South America. Numerous photos exist of both branches in service on the mainland, with the Navy operating one of its two subchaser schools from Miami docks.

Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the entire South lived under the hideous provisions of Jim Crow laws, which required all businesses to have separate water fountains and bathrooms for Black and white patrons, with other such vile laws enforced by government mandate. Much has changed since then, and with Miami about to celebrate its 125th year of incorporation, it is still – even amid the problems, anguish, anxieties and frustration seething across the country – a great place to live, a most marvelous place to raise a family and, for most, an excellent place in which to work.

And so it is, as we wish Miami a joyous and happy 125th birthday, that we also relay good thoughts for many more. As a famous and beloved personage was wont to say, “May the force be with you!”

Seth H. Bramson is adjunct professor of history and Historian-in-Residence at Barry University. The lifelong Miamian is also the company historian of the Florida East Coast Railway, a prolific Florida history book author and the country’s senior collector of Floridiana and Florida East Coast Railway, Florida transportation and Miami memorabilia. This past May marks his 63rd year of collecting – as he likes to say – “all this junk!”