Becoming Broward

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Broward County’s creation. Pompano had been an incorporated municipality for seven years when the new county came into being, and in the century that has followed a lot has taken place to transform this city and the county from a lightly-populated farming region into one of America’s major metropolitan centers. However, history did not begin in 1915.

Prior to Broward County, the area that is today Pompano Beach was a part of various counties, beginning in 1821 when Florida became a territory of the United States. Florida’s first territorial government established just two counties: St. Johns County, which encompassed much of the peninsula and Escambia County, which took in Florida’s panhandle region. Although St. Johns County was larger in area than many states in the Union, except for the area around St. Augustine, it was practically devoid of settlers. What is today Pompano Beach was a wilderness.

A few years later, in 1824, the Florida Territorial Legislature created a new county. It encompassed a huge portion of central Florida, extending to the territory’s southeast coastal region, and was given the name Mosquito County. Early maps show the southern boundary of the county as being south of the Hillsboro Inlet, perhaps at today’s Middle River in Wilton Manors. Still, what is today Pompano Beach was populated, if at all, by just a small number of Seminole Indians who had had been driven south by warfare and increased white settlements in northern Florida. Eventually Mosquito County would be reduced in size and renamed; it now is known as Orange County.

On December 28, 1835, Major Francis Dade was marching a contingent to U. S. Army troops from Fort Brook (Tampa) to Fort King (Ocala). Along the route the soldiers were ambushed by Seminole Indians and killed almost to a man. What became known as the Dade Massacre was the start of the Second Seminole War. Prior to this event, the Florida Territorial Legislature had approved the creation of a new county covering the southeast coast of Florida, running from the Bahia Honda in the Keys to the St. Lucie Inlet. In the immediate aftermath of the Dade Massacre, the county’s name was changed from its intended moniker, Pinckney County (after Thomas Pinckney, a Revolutionary War officer) to Dade County.

For much of its early history Dade County was sparsely populated due to almost two decades of Indian wars, the Civil War and the lack of safe transportation into the area. The first “major” roadway in the county (actually a nine-foot wide gravel road), connecting Miami to Lantana wasn’t constructed until 1892. It was the arrival of the Florida East Coast Railway into Palm Beach in 1894 and its subsequent extension to Miami in 1896 that ended the area’s isolation.The railroad allowed people to travel to South Florida, but just as important it provided a means for the region’s agricultural goods to be shipped to northern markets. Soon farming settlements and towns were established alongside the tracks, including Pompano.

Problems began to arise within Dade County as the communities in the northern part of the county complained that their tax dollars were being spent to the benefit of Miami, the county seat, while they were shortchanged on services such as law enforcement, public works and sanitation.

By the early years of the twentieth century some settlements such as Pompano sought to solve these issues by incorporating, thus allowing local government to address local problems. On a larger scale, citizens in northern Dade County were urging the Florida Legislature to allow them to form their own county.

The first attempt to create the new county took place in 1907, and although the incorporation bill passed the Florida Senate, it failed in the House of Representatives. When the delegation returned to Tallahassee in 1909 (at that time the Legislature met biennially), the bill was approved and Palm Beach became the state's 47th county on July 1st of that year. It had a population of approximately 5,300 people and stretched from the St. Lucie Inlet in the north to Pompano, its southernmost town.

Within a few years, though, serious talk began about the creation of a new county out of portions of Dade and Palm Beach. It seemed to be a given that the Hillsboro canal would form the northern border of the new county, which would remove Pompano from Palm Beach.

One of the factors in the effort to create Broward County was the issue of alcohol. In a referendum on the issue of allowing the sale and consumption of liquor, the northern part of Dade County had voted "dry" by an overwhelming majority. This led many in the Miami area, who wanted alcohol sales to favor the formation of a new county, thus removing a large number of anti-liquor voters from Dade.

Originally, local residents wanted to name their new county Everglades, but in a somewhat ironic move it was decided to honor the individual who had sought to drain the "River of Grass" – Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. Elected governor of Florida in 1904, Broward had championed Everglades drainage and initiated the digging of canals that would divert the flow of water into the ocean. Even though the drainage canals did not produce what was promised, some lands were drained and new farmlands emerged from the muck.

On October 1, 1915, Broward County became Florida’s 51st county. The new county was 24 miles north to south and 48 miles east to west, but its population of 4,700 people was concentrated almost exclusively within a mile or two of the coastline. It had only three incorporated municipalities: Dania, Pompano and Fort Lauderdale.

On the day Broward became a county, Pompano residents, along with others from throughout the new county, celebrated with festivities in the new county seat, Fort Lauderdale. The day included picnic lunches, a parade, concert and speeches from newly elected County Commissioners, one of whom was Isaac I. Hardy of Pompano.

Although those present at that celebration had high hopes for their new county, few, if any, could have imagined the changes the next century would bring.

Courtesy of the Pompano Beach Historical Society. All rights reserved.