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This history of early Florida sounds like the valley of defilement (Politico)

G

Guevara

Member
The first Americans to spend much time in South Florida were the U.S. Army men who chased the Seminole Indians around the peninsula in the 1830s. And they hated it. Today, their letters read like Yelp reviews of an arsenic café, denouncing the region as a “hideous,” “loathsome,” “diabolical,” “God-abandoned” mosquito refuge.

“Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one Army surgeon wrote. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” An officer summarized it as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” The future president Zachary Taylor, who commanded U.S. troops there for two years, groused that he wouldn’t trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida. The consensus among the soldiers was that the U.S. should just leave the area to the Indians and the mosquitoes; as one general put it, “I could not wish them all a worse place.” Or as one lieutenant complained: “Millions of money has been expended to gain this most barren, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula.”

Today, Florida’s southern thumb has been transformed into a subtropical paradise for millions of residents and tourists, a sprawling megalopolis dangling into the Gulf Stream that could sustain hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if Hurricane Irma makes a direct hit. So it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won. “How far, far out of the world it seems,” Iza Hardy wrote in an 1887 book called Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida. And Hardy ventured only as far south as Orlando, which is actually central Florida, nearly 250 miles north of Miami. Back then, only about 300 hardy pioneers lived in modern-day South Florida. Miami wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896. And even then an early visitor declared that if he owned Miami and hell, he would rent out Miami and live in hell.

There was really just one reason South Florida remained so unpleasant and so empty for so long: water. The region was simply too soggy and swampy for development. Its low-lying flatlands were too vulnerable to storms and floods. As a colorful governor with the colorful name of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward put it: “Water is the common enemy of the people of Florida.”

...

That’s because it was dominated by the Everglades, an inhospitable expanse of impenetrable sawgrass marshland, described in an 1845 Treasury Department report as “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles.” White men avoided it, because they viewed wetlands as wastelands. As late as 1897, five years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the Western frontier, an explorer named Hugh Willoughby embarked on a Lewis-and-Clark-style journey of discovery through the Everglades in a dugout canoe. “It may seem strange, in our days of Arctic and African exploration for the public to learn that in our very midst, in one of our Atlantic coast states, we have a tract of land 130 miles long and 70 miles wide that is as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa,” Willoughby wrote.

But white men began to realize that South Florida had real potential if they could figure out how to drain its “monstrous” swamp.

...in 1928, another Category 4 storm blasted Lake Okeechobee through its flimsy dike, killing 2,500 and abruptly ending the Everglades boom. It was the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and afterward Florida’s attorney general testified before Congress that much of the southern half of his state might be unsuited to human habitation: “I’ve heard it advocated that what the people ought to do is build a wall down there and keep the military there to keep people from coming in."
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/hurricane-irma-florida-215586

They had GAF in the 1800s?
 
E

EMT0

Banned
Disneyland, AC, and Cubans. The magical combination that made Central-South Florida worth anything at all.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
bachikarn said:
Air conditioning was quite the invention.
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And, the terrible thing is that A/C is what makes large swaths of the world "livable", it's a huge source of greenhouse gases, which in turn are making even larger swaths of the world unbearably hot. The NYTimes estimated A/C is a bigger contributor to global climate change than the meat industry.

It definitely feels like barring some massive changes in the course of global events south Florida is doomed. Its limestone rockbeds means there's no way to effectively dike or pump out rising sea levels.

It is impressive to go to the Everglades and imagine that as what most of the terrain was once like.

One nice thing about being developed so recently: Miami has some awesome art deco architecture.
 
R

radios shipping overview

Member
I've never read up on the history of Florida, so I was surprised to hear on an Anthony Bourdain show about how recently it had been developed, almost in parallel with the west/southwest. And hearing about the circumstances under which it was developed, suddenly so much about the state made sense.
 
N

Neece

Member
Obligatory

cut_off_florida.gif
 
S

SwiftDeath

Member
Modern mosquito mitigation might honestly be more worthwhile a boon to FL than Central A/C

Malaria and the like are no joke

God Dayumm said:
Why did the Spaniards call it Florida (flowery) if it was such a hell? lol
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"Commander, this place is awful. What should we call it?"

"We shall call it Florida!"

"Flowery? What the hell is flowery about this place?"

"Nothing, absolutely nothing but the name will make the English or the silly Americans try to fight for it."
 
V

Viewt

Member
Fun Fact: The nexus of Floridian insanity is in Tampa. If you find yourself in Tampa and start hearing voices, be sure to vacate the city within 24 hours. A hellspawn is attempting to bond with you and keep you there forever.
 
I

I H8 Memes

Member
All true. My favorite outdoor activity is hiking. I live in Florida. I dont hike. Hiking in florida is a journey of discovery where each new thing is more disgusting than the last.
 
F

Fragamemnon

Member
Before you write this off entirely-go spend a day in the late spring/summer in Everglades National Park. Nowadays we can appreciate its beauty and uniqueness-but even today it's still a pretty rough experience between the heat, humidity , and mosquitoes. Back then almost ALL of Florida was like that.
 
manfestival

manfestival

Member
Viewt said:
Fun Fact: The nexus of Floridian insanity is in Tampa. If you find yourself in Tampa and start hearing voices, be sure to vacate the city within 24 hours. A hellspawn is attempting to bond with you and keep you there forever.
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I don't get it.
 
M

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Very interesting article, thank you for sharing. I didn't know this about Florida's early colonial history.

And yeah those descriptions sure sound like VoD/Blighttown, haha.

I liked these passages from the article:

The problem, like most problems in South Florida, is a water problem. Half the Everglades has been drained or paved for agriculture and development, so in the rainy season, water managers have to dump excess water into estuaries and what’s left of the Everglades. Then it’s no longer available in the dry season, which is why South Florida now faces structural droughts that create wildfires in the Everglades and endanger the region’s drinking water, which happens to sit underneath the Everglades.
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But the fundamental issue is that South Florida is an artificial civilization, engineered and air-conditioned to insulate its residents and tourists from the realities of its natural landscape. We call animal control when alligators wander into our backyards, and it doesn’t occur to us that we’ve wandered into the alligators’ backyard.
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Most of us came here to escape reality, not to deal with it.
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Damn.

Breads said:
I agree, having lived there for 20 years. I can safely say it's the demon's souls of states.
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lmao
 
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