Before Pompano

After controlling Florida for almost four hundred years, in 1821 Spain transferred the peninsula to the United States. At that time, the area had an estimated population of about 25.000 people, most of who lived along the northern fringe of the newly-acquired territory. The United States had sought the acquisition of Florida to remove a European power from its border and to better deal with what many considered lawlessness encouraged (or at least ignored) by the Spanish.

During the early years of the nineteenth century continued expansion of settlements in the southern United States led to ongoing conflicts with the indigenous population, pushing Indians south into Spanish Florida. Violence in northern Florida, including raids by U.S. military forces, led these Indians, now known as the Seminoles, to retreat into the wilderness of central and southern Florida.

At this time, southern Florida was almost entirely devoid of people, Indian or white. By the 1820s and 1830s, however, both Seminoles and white settlers had drifted into southeastern Florida. With plenty of land, the two cultures coexisted for a while, but it was an uneasy situation. In the mid-1830s, the United States' government’s decision to forcibly remove the Seminoles from Florida inevitably led to an outbreak of hostilities.

Among the small settlements that had been established along the south Florida coast was one on the New River, in what is today Fort Lauderdale. The 70 or so settlers survived by farming and wrecking – salvaging the cargoes of ships that ran aground or sank in the area. In 1835, the Spanish brigantine Gil Blas sank at the Hillsboro Inlet, probably as the result of bad weather, if not a hurricane. Men from the New River settlement set out to salvage the ship’s cargo, which was partially submerged, but not far offshore. While they were gone, Seminoles attacked the frontier settlement, killing several residents and causing the other settlers to flee for their lives. The Second Seminole War had begun in southern Florida.

For several years the Seminoles ruled the area uncontested, but following the Battle of the Loxahatchee in January 1838, General Thomas S. Jesup ordered Major William Lauderdale and his Tennessee Volunteers to cut a trail south from Ft. Jupiter to New River. On March 2nd of that year, Major Lauderdale left Fort Jupiter with a contingent of 233 Tennessee Volunteers and a company of the Army's 3rd Artillery Regiment, who were responsible for clearing roadways through the wilderness for men, animals and wagons.

Traveling along the coast would have required traversing the marshes and lagoons and tidal areas, and so the units march along the high ground to the west -- a pine ridge that ran south from Indian River Inlet to Biscayne Bay.. In four days, Major Lauderdale's command carved a 63-mile trail to New River. Army topographer Frederick Searles designated the primitive road "Lauderdale's Route", and it later became the path for all future Indian military operations from Fort Jupiter to New River and Ft. Dallas (Miami). Today much of Lauderdale's route is known as Military Trail.

Arriving in the region, Major Lauderdale established a military outpost on the banks of the New River. As was the custom of the time, the fortification was named after the commanding officer. The military chased the elusive Seminoles through the swamps and across the waterways of South Florida, but with little success. Attrition took its toll, however. By the end of the Third Seminole War in 1855, there were only about 250 Seminoles remaining in all of southern Florida, most of them living in isolation in the Everglades.

After nearly twenty years of warfare, there were even fewer non-Indians left in south Florida, and few who wanted to settle there. An exception was a man named Cobb (no first name was recorded). According to military reports, Mr. Cobb was living at or near the Hillsboro Inlet in the mid-1850s. The report does not indicate whether or not he had a family or others living with him.

In January 1856, Mr. Cobb arrived at Fort Dallas and told the military officials there he had been warned by several Indians he had befriended that conflict between the Seminoles and whites was about to begin and that he should leave the area. In fact, the short-lived Third Seminole War was already over, although most of the action had been confined to southwest Florida. There is no further mention of the mysterious Mr. Cobb or what he decided to do.

Within a few years, the Civil War raged to the north and further retarded any growth that might have otherwise occurred in the region. During the conflict southeaster Florida had been described as a haven for draft-dodgers, military deserters, and fugitives from the law. The area’s isolated inlets provided a hiding place for Confederate blockade-runners seeking to escape capture by the Union gunboats patrolling offshore.

The end of the Civil War did not bring a surge of settlers. By 1870, the population of Dade County (which included today's Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Martin counties) stood at only 85 people, just a fraction of its population when it was created in 1836. By 1880 the population had climbed to 257, and ten years later Dade's population stood at just 861.

The dearth of people living in South Florida into the 1890s was in large part the result of the difficulty in traveling to the region. There were still no roads or railways providing access to the area. All that would change in the mid-1890s, when Henry M. Flagler brought his Florida East Coast Railway into South Florida. Almost immediately new towns were established (West Palm Beach in 1895 and Miami in 1896) and agricultural settlements, including Pompano, grew alongside the railroad tracks. For the first time there was a transportation system that not only could bring people into South Florida, but also provide a means to ship its agricultural products north to a national market.

By 1900, South Florida’s population had increased to almost 5,000, and ten years later to nearly 18,000. The nation had found South Florida and the influx of new residents has continued apace through today.