Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida

by Mark Derr

"The history of Florida is the story of North America in miniature. By telling it with such eloquence and learning in ‘Some Kind of Paradise,’ Mr. Derr has revealed the dark side of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous our national character was indeed shaped by the frontier. . . . [Derr] writes with a journalist’s eye for telling details and an antiquarian’s fondness for digression and quirky facts. . . . The state’s tortuous journey from one extreme to the other is [his] subject, and he tackles it with brilliance and bravado."― New York Times Book Review
For 500 years, visitors to Florida have discovered magic. In Some Kind of Paradise , an eloquent social and environmental history of the state, Mark Derr describes how this exotic land is fast becoming a victim of its own allure.

 He begins by examining the period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, when wealthy capitalists led by Henry Flagler and Henry Plant opened the peninsula to a flood of development by building railroads and luxury hotels.

 Turning to the distant past, he describes the geologic origins of the state and early fossil finds. From archaeological data, he stitches together a portrait of the first human inhabitants and their distinct cultures, then follows the thread of time to the "discovery" of Florida in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, the fall of the indigenous people to European diseases and weapons, and the pattern of conquest and racial violence that continued into the 19th century as white Americans waged a campaign against the Seminole Indians.

 Derr keeps his gaze on the land and its people―wreckers and spongers in Key West, cowmen on the "palmetto prairie," speculators and builders from Miami Beach to Seaside, Cuban cigar makers who rolled tobacco while listening to readings from Shakespeare and Marx, and migrant fruit pickers, convict laborers, and the idle rich―the range of dreamers and schemers who have struggled to remake this abundant, fragile wonderland. Written with both tenderness and alarm, Derr’s book presents their competing views of a paradise to be protected and nurtured or a frontier to be exploited and conquered.
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction

440 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1989

Reviews

[Robin Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

First edition was published 1989, but for a history of FL up to the 90s, this is a must-read book.

Some informal notes:
Some Kind of Paradise
A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida

Mark Derr (first edition 1989)

Henry Flagler opened east coast to rail travel, resort hotels pb and miami. opened FL’s biggest modern industries tourism and citriculture.

palm trees and alligators
Backwoods Eden.

The peninsula

RR
blatant disregard for the landscape
Indians extirpated, Negro help exploited

Miami Royal Palms, Palm Beach The Breakers still there.
Ponciana on Lake Worth

(Cowford became Jax)

Naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson, Ralph Munroe another Biscayne Bay resident, another Kirk Munroe founded League of American Wheelmen, the Brickells, and later David Fairchild. Ruining the Biscayne aquifer by pumping out for growing pop. Raw sewage and sludge choked the Miami River and the bay; sediment despoiled the shoreline. Wood and coal smoke from power plants, trains and steamboats befouled the air. Disease. Drinking works on floating saloons for RR. Julia Tuttle greedy.

Flagler brought Casuarina (Australian pine) to Key West around 1860 by mariners b/c fast-growing and created windbreaks. But topples easy and shades out all other vegetation. Flagler ordered for Miami and Palm Beach. Another Australian import melaleuca even more invasive and damaging (aka cajeput). John Gifford introduced 1906 thinking would dry out the Everglades and began sowing seeds in Miami. Poison resin and ppl allergic and animals inc birds can’t thrive in it.
ALso brazilian pepper. Hyacinth, tried for cattle feed but chem feed too cheap to compete.
Also deliberately introduced fish tilapia, walking catfish, oscar; poison toad eat eggs ground-nesting birds.

Henry Plant: Tampa

Marshes and swamps critical since 1900 waves of settlers transformed, wastes, rivers suffered, oceans too.

The Miami RIver i a canal nw, walled in and polluted from Lake Okeechobee to Biscayne Bay. Ralph Munroe a little more than a century ago: beautiful clear-water stream banks lined with towering coco-palms and mangroves.

Harriett Beecher Stowe: destroying nature. After Reconstruction.

Like their counterparts in the American West who were laying waste the herds of bison and antelope, the flocks of passenger pigeons, these Florida sportsmen cared primarily for blood.

Shot from steamers “sport”..on Indian River. Titus is a shadowy figure, pro-slavery, opened a hotel Tropical style, large main building with 2 long wings, one story high the Titus Hotel
Oklawaha tourist boats mythic waterway.

OJ, graft, hybrid, withstand cold, grapefruit mostly here.
Drained: in the parlance of progress: reclaimed.
Disston the largest land grant, triangle Marco Island to SS to Titusville half of FL, “reclaimed” dredged, filled. For transpo, expansion.

Palmetto Prairies - cattle, burn prairie so better envir.

Logging clean comparing to turpentining. like chattel slavery.
Racism
Crackers
Cuban Ybor, Tampa cigars, rr, sponges.
Timber clear pines, farmed yellow pine lacks the hard heartwood.
Cubans socialistic strikes.

Vagrancy laws - arrest and forced servitude in prison convict-lease (began 1877) simply for not having train fare or place to sleep. Mostly black - work best in heat.

Readers in factories- revolutionary works.
1933 replaced with radios.

Crackers, conchs, Spaniards, AfAms, Cubans, Minorcans, Seminole, West Indians, Swedes, Poles, smattering of Asians ethnic mix turn of the century

Tactics to exterminate Indians: slaughter food sucs bison and antelope, massacre of women, children, elderly, negotiation of treaties that were betrayed, forceable removal of tribes from their homeland, biological destructions through the introduction of smallpox, murder of prisoners.

Rookeries - vanished birds in the 1880s, plumes, went on and on til most gone.
Skies once held rainbows of birds.
Plumes prostitutes
poachers killed game wardens.

Alligators, crocs, orchids, exotica, grasshoppers, herps
Sabal palm, the original heart of palm, cut out, killed the trees.
moss picking, land tortoise/gopher tortoise from dry pinelands, sea turtles. Suffered caught, squished, habitat loss.
Human predation, depredation.

played out catfish

Wm Bartram in 18th c could cross St Johns River on allig heads.

1930s freezing advancement encouraged more fishing and shipment.

Arsenic dip cattle ticks poisoned soil, water supply, early 1900s.
1935 outbreak , blamed deer, made up 54% infested statistic. Paid bounties, wiped out in Central FL, a few survived in Cypress south FL., saved by hunter-environmentalist alliance in 1940w, finally stopped assault early 1950s.

Everglades, Hugh Willoughby from Rhode Island, appreciated indigenous people’s knowledge. Used dugout. Pole canoe. Ingraham: drain for useful ag.

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward steamboat runner, hated blacks ship to Af, pseudopopulist, plan to drain Everglades, land for crackers to farm, fill Lake Okeechobee, dig navigable canals to both coasts to allow steamboats to compete with RRs.

Construction resembled a military campaign.

Tamiami Trail cut across interrupting lake’s flow.

Campaign 1928 declase Everglades National Park...fruition 1948?

Architectural style established in Palm Beach mansion by Mizner distinctive adaptations of Mediterranean design.

Mizner est factories to make the tile, ceramics and furniture he required. Also elaborated on SInger’s recognition that the bright, cloud-festooned sky, the flat terrain, the ocean,and lush vegetation of south FL demanded facades painted in bold pastels that the sunlight intensified. At its best, the design pops from the landscape without abusing it or the senses.

Following Mizner, architects elaborated a style called Florida-Mediterranean, which combined real and imagined Italian, Spanish and Moorish elements.

Ethnic and racial discrimination that permeated much of south Fl’s deve was codified in cities from Palm Beach to MB, inc Mizner’s Boca Raton, which excluded Jews and blacks.


Vizcaya $15 mil baroque mansion of stuccoed concreted on Biscayne bay trimmed in coral, and roofed with tiles that had once covered an entire Cuban village. Balconies off each second-story berm overlooked the central courtyard; a swimming pool lay haf indoors, half-outdoors. Harvester magnate James Deering for his health. Decorated interior with imported tiles, Renaissance art, adornments from any Italian palace he could raid. ..even gondolas cruised canals on the property.

Gondolas, elephants among sales lures by Carl Fisher in turned his reconfigured sand key into a first-class resort. First wife in bathing suit, angered the Miami clergy, rise of bathing beauties, hawked with celebrities, polo field to attract pple otherwise to to more ritzy Palm Beach.

Tin Can Tourist Camps in 1919 in DeSoto Park, Tampa...motorists now that cars had roads to visit FL. Tin Can Tourist Camps sprang up around every major city in FL and along highways and byways during the 1920s and flourished until the motel supplanted them.

WIth a mixed economy of shipping, mining (phosphates), ranching, shipbuilding and tourism, Tampa expanded rapidly.

FL southern terminus for winter mansions of famous industrialist: Vanderbilts, Deering, Edison, Ford, Firestone.

Canals prevented proper recharge of the freshwater aquifer underlying Miami.

The boom was a collective national lust for Florida land, an orgy of town building, hucksterism, construction, and destruction. Florida possessed whatever a person sought -- a healing climate, year-round recreation, abundant fertile ground.

Baseball Grapefruit league.
Refrigerators to bring and keep food.
A/c in movie theater expanded over the years to homes, bringing more residents.

Nov 1924 George Gandy opened 14-mile bridge from Tampa to St. Petersburg.

David Fairchild recalled the destruction of many areas … the magnificent Ficus nitida tree at Buena Vista of Miami region torn and dragged out as turned into a ghastly waste of suburban lots.

1930 termite infested Royal Palm demolished.
Coconut Grove posh.
George Merrick Coral Gables in the pinelands, which was Cracker country: planned city with diff country-inspired n’hoods. Culture, Venetian Pool in old limestone quarry above an artesian well. William Jennings Bryan pitched the new town for $100,000 and blocks of real estate.

If the thought of a public pool brings to mind a stale rectangular hole in the ground you haven’t visited the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. Throw away all preconceptions of a public pool; this is a pool unlike any you’ve ever seen before.
The Venetian Pool is the only swimming pool on the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s no wonder why. This former rock quarry was turned into the Venetian Pool in 1924, then called the “Venetian Casino,” and has remained the most beautiful and unique public pool in the country. Palm trees surround the Venetian Pool and the roaring waterfall drowns all sounds of traffic out – there’s not a building in sight.
This 820,000 gallon pool is filled with fresh water from an underground aquifer and surrounded by the original coral rock. There are caves and waterfalls, little nooks carved into the coral, a sandy area for staying dry and an open swimming area. During the summer the pool is refilled daily from the artesian wells and there are never any chemicals in the water.
Bring the kids. Venetian Pool is a very popular summer camp field trip and a favorite amongst young locals for birthday parties and special Saturdays. There’s a shallow kiddy area connected to the main pool by an island and stone bridge to keep beginner swimmers safe and away from the deeper waters.
Don’t miss the dark caves and waterfalls, which are located on the far side of the pool.
Looking to have a relaxing day in a little historical haven that feels removed from the busy city life? Venetian Pool is just minutes away from Downtown Coral Gables. It’s a lovely place to read a book or lounge in the sun or shade; it’s a great alternative to the beach.
Coral Gables was a fully planned city designed by George Merrick in 1925. Merrick dreamt of a place inspired by Mediterranean architecture, covered in canopies of trees where residential space and international business could both flourish. Venetian Pool was part of this plan and much of the coral, used for grand entrances to the city, in plazas and homes was taken from this quarry.
The Venetian Pool was envisioned as a community hub where locals could congregate and swim, mingle within the community or watch a synchronized swimming show. There are photos documenting this history along the entrance to the facility. Sometimes, they would drain the pool and hold a concert with a full orchestra at the bottom of the pool. The pool has been renovated several times to keep its original charm, so don’t expect any modern models. It’s pretty much just as it was during those synchronized swimming competitions. History buffs, this is a little slice of preserved history that you can feel a part of.
In south Fl, the new canals created hundreds of miles of waterfront property, and few buyers bothered to image the previous rivers and streams. Fingers surrounded by houses, docks.

Built across wet prairies and hammocks.

Connors 1924 completed road to Okeechobee City, not sold his dream city, state in 1930 bought his road.

Man changed ⅓ of landscape. Wetlands, before heavy development a century ago, covered up to 60 percent of its surface, now 15 to 20% (book released 1989).
Atlantic Coastal Ridge
Keys Coral Reef Zone.
Urbanized lowlands.
320 springs from artesian flow.
Pollutants showed up in aquifer water/groundwater.
The Everglades watershed - sawgrass, shrubs, dense forest of gumbo-limbo, mahogany, royal palm.
hammocks: pocket of hardwoods. Swamps like Big Cypress Swamp.
Mosaic
Mangroves - animal life dependent on proper blend of fresh and salt water. Water had become too saline for fish and insects needed by birds around Florida B

[Jacqui H. Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent history of how Florida was exploited, ecologically damaged, and raped of resources from the 1800's through the 20th century.
It gives painfully detailed explanations of how industrial millionaires, unscrupulous real estate scammers, and irresponsible corporate agriculturalists were only interested in their own greedy exploits at the cost of the natural delicate balance of the land. Unfortunately, many of them now have counties, cities, and towns in the state named after them.
This book also gives textbook detail of the flora, fauna, terrain, water systems, and history of Florida. While I like details, this might be too much detail for some.
The greatest takeaway I got from this book is that if we don't learn from our history's mistakes, we are unfortunately doomed to repeat them.
The author did extensive research into public records, public documents, court records, university and scholastic publications, and many other resources which, to me, seemed pretty reliable.
I am a native Floridian and have been for 64 of my 69 years, having moved to the Florida panhandle in 1957. I have witnessed many of these exploitations which turned what was then a beautiful, pristine, untouched coastal environment into wall-to-wall high rises on sandy barrier islands which cannot support the commercial growth.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a Floridian. Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr, almost makes me happy about that. But it also makes me far too sad to really claim any joy.

I have not always claimed to be a Floridian. When I went to college and introduced myself, I disclaimed any attachment to the state where I'd spent over half my life. Instead I said I merely lived there, but was really from someplace else. I had at that point no intention of returning.

That I'd spent half my life in the state and still couldn't call it home is pretty remarkable. More remarkable is the change I experienced in my attitude to Florida over just the next few years. I studied the state. I examined it in several ways, it's development and politics particularly. I became interested in it. But most importantly, I suppose I missed it.

It's hard to understand why. I don't especially like it there. Winters in Florida are wonderful, of course, and autumn isn't bad (though that season is best experienced in the southern Appalachians). I love the afternoon thunderstorms in the summer, but the heat and humidity serve to chase me indoors most summer days and I can't set foot outside in the spring for the pollen. The state is a huge mass of sprawl; even small communities far from major urban centers smear across the landscape like seagull droppings on wet sand. The major urban centers themselves are choked with traffic, unfriendly to pedestrians, and generally high in crime. Our schools are lousy. Our politicians are among the most ridiculous in the country. Frankly, to my mind, there's very little to recommend the place. Once I finally moved away, when I went to college, I was glad to be rid of the place.

And it was only once rid of the place that I started to appreciate it. Perhaps that's not the right word, appreciate. Instead I developed a morbid fascination with it, an attachment I couldn't fully explain and didn't expect. I moved back to the state, voluntarily, and stayed for two years. When I again had a chance to leave, with the Air Force, I managed to move first to a city only 20 miles from the state line, and although I ultimately made it halfway across the continent I moved right back to Florida the first chance I got.

And now that I'm thinking about leaving again, as I do every few years, I find myself inexplicably drawn to stay. For it isn't Florida itself that I love. It's the idea of Florida, an idea that loom large in Some Kind of Paradise.

I'm a practicing cynic, especially about the environment and double especially about Florida. I shouldn't have any sense of idealism about my home; the place is doomed. I don't think Florida can save itself and I don't believe any of the ten million people who will move there in the next 20 years know it needs to be saved. If they did, they wouldn't move in, but they don't care or don't understand what's wrong with the place. They are responding not to Florida as it is, but Florida as they want it to be.

And that, my friends, is the truth of Florida: she is a temptress. She calls to me as surely as the sirens did to Ulysses, as surely as she called to Ponce de Leon and Pánfilo de Narváez with tales of riches and a fountain of youth, as surely as she calls every summer to millions of Disneyfied tourists, as surely as she does to the thousand people who move in every day. Florida is most attractive to us when we're nowhere near her, when all we can here is the beautiful song, the eternal, unyielding sales pitch: "This is paradise."

It's some kind of Paradise, all right, but not the sort theologians and supplicants imagine. In truth I don't suppose Florida has ever lived up to expectations. The natives were violent and uninterested in welcoming white explorers—who did plenty to foster the natives' antipathy. Even upon settling the place and beginning to tame it, the Spanish found Florida devoid of the riches they sought, and the Fountain of Youth passed into myth.

The state's early settlers found a place of unmitigated difficulty, with fierce wildlife, poor soils, and resources that, though valuable at one time or another, were difficult to extract profitably. The climate kept out all but the hardiest souls until the state was finally tamed by railroads and the dream of transcontinental travel, and of winter retreats, became reality. Even then the state was never paradise for more than a handful of wealthy part-time residents; the vast majority of the state's population struggled to survive in a harsh and unyielding environment.

Parts of the state remained untamed until man in his infinite wisdom decided that Lake Okeechobee and the rivers that drained it, particularly the Everglades, were obstacles to be surmounted—or in this case to be dredged. Thousands were enticed to come to Florida to the most fertile land on Earth, to a place where one had only to cast seeds upon the ground and watch crops of all manner grow in rich soil without a hand to tend them. This fantasy died a quick death when the Everglades muck turned out to be nigh infertile without constant infusions of nutrients, but the name "Florida" had made its way into the national consciousness as a place where untold wealth might be had.

Very soon land speculators began to carve the state up into townsites and developments, and everyone was offered a chance to own a piece of paradise. This boom lasted only a few years before it collapsed, preceding the national Great Depression by three years and leaving hundreds of land promoters and other scoundrels penniless and thousands more people stuck with deeds to worthless, undeveloped and often unusable land.

And what of today? What is it about my Florida that keeps calling me, that keeps calling thousands of families a week to pull up stakes and move south? It's still paradise, but in an altogether different form. I guess the truth is, I no longer understand it. I've spent most of my life in paradise, and I don't like it. If this is Paradise, I'll be damned.

This is a wonderful book. It falls short in some ways, soars in others, but it has the siren song at its core, and anyone who's heard it knows it will always echo in their heart and mind.

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually first started this book five years ago, after buying it on a vacation trip to Fla, half of it spent in or around the Everglades. never finished it, then picked it up again after this year's trip to Fla. It's a fine, if idiosyncratic take on human impact on the land, especially post-Columbian, and even more especially post Civil War, when towns and road and finally (in the early 20th century) railroads came to Florida. It's the usual story, with a subtropical twist: native genocide, zero planning, mindless destruction, though here driven much more by tourism than elsewhere in the US, and much more likely to be blown away by hurricanes. But Derr is good at emphasizing that Fla is really industrial, too (cross the state latitudinally south of Orlando some time, and take in the phosphate-mining wasteland, for instance). Especially horrifying of course is the exploitation of the Glades, from the annihilation of birds there 100+ years ago for ladies' headwear (shades of the N. American beaver massacre for men's headwear two centuries earlier) and the more recent canalization, which has terribly damaged this unique and amazing ecosystem. Derr is prone to odd, seemingly digressive chapters, half-immune to chronology, but it's all pretty fascinating stuff.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Derr writes broadly, sweepingly, and adeptly in this book, which reads like a collection of essays all unified by their theme of Floridian culture. This is not your typical book on Florida history, nor does it follow any real timeline, but what it provides is a very nuanced, expertly written, and entertaining view of the crazy cast of characters and odd events that have made Florida what it is today. I go back to this book often, alongside Gloria Jahoda, Archie Carr, and David Warner's writing on Florida. I would suggest it to any student of Florida history because it contains a lot of the little details left out of more official accounts and is quite good at giving an impression of what the state was like at various points in its development.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A history of Florida. Flagler's railroad,work camps, land acquistion, real estate development, the near decimation of the bird population, the Cross Florida Barge Canal, turning swamps into subdivision, Crackers, Conchs, and so much more.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most complete book on early Florida I have found. Anyone who thinks they know Florida (and about Florida) should read it.