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    Pleasant City, West Palm Beach
    Pleasant City, West Palm Beach
    Pleasant City, West Palm Beach
    Ebook223 pages38 minutes

    Pleasant City, West Palm Beach

    By Everee Jimerson Clarke

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    Pleasant City, a neighborhood of West Palm Beach, Florida, is the oldest African-American community in Palm Beach County. The first black settlers came to a place called the Styx later owned by white millionaires who then rented their backyards to black workers to work on the railroad and Henry Flagler s hotel and mansion. Forced out when the land became valuable, the blacks purchased land and settled Pleasant City. Pleasant City was marketed as a High Class Colored Subdivision in 1913, and many of the pioneers still have descendants in the area today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateApr 20, 2005
    ISBN9781439629772
    Pleasant City, West Palm Beach
    Author

    Everee Jimerson Clarke

    Author Everee Jimerson Clarke is the founder and president of the Pleasant City Family Reunion Committee, Inc., and Heritage Gallery. Clarke shares her love of the Pleasant City community, its founders, and its descendants with this poignant collection of images and stories.

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      Book preview

      Pleasant City, West Palm Beach - Everee Jimerson Clarke

      workers.

      INTRODUCTION

      Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves who escaped from plantations in Alabama and Georgia hid in the Florida Everglades among the Seminole Indians, while others escaped to the Caribbean Islands. The Maroons, descendants of runaway slaves, fled South Carolina and other slaves states seeking protection in Florida. Many pioneers of Pleasant City, West Palm Beach, came from Georgia, Alabama, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands.

      Black squatters were in South Florida along the southern end of Lake Worth long before Henry Morrison Flagler, Standard Oil magnate and land developer, decided to build a resort hotel on Palm Beach Island.

      In 1893, almost 20 years before land developer George Curry created a subdivision on the north end of West Palm Beach and called it Pleasant City, more than 1,000 black skilled and unskilled laborers were hired by the firm of McDonald & McGuire. Their job was to extend the now East Coast Railway from Juno, north of Riviera Beach, to transport materials for the Royal Poinciana Hotel and White Hall for Henry Flagler. Many workers came by boat from Jacksonville, the Gateway to Florida, because roads were few and automobiles were not available.

      Flagler purchased land and laid out the town site of West Palm Beach in 1893 but requested that all construction workers move to the east side or to Palm Beach Island. The Styx, a community of palmetto and driftwood shacks, boardinghouses, and shanties along a stretch of North County Road and Sunrise Avenue north of the Breakers Hotel, came into existence to provide living quarters for these black workers.

      White millionaires who built their mansions on the waterfront but owned land that stretched across the island from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean owned the Styx property. They rented their back yards at a cost of $3.00 per month. Blacks lived on the land and took care of the property while the owners went North or elsewhere in the summer. Some are said to have owned parcels of land. Along with the railroad, a footbridge was built across Lake Worth in 1896 to connect the two Palm Beaches.

      The rich and famous arriving in West Palm Beach aboard the Florida East Coast train were backed over the trestle, over Lake Worth to the Royal Poinciana station, next to the hotel. Tourists came to Palm Beach for the season, arriving in the winter and leaving in the spring.

      Life in the Styx was simple. Many male residents worked in the newly built hotel as waiters, bellhops, elevator operators, and guards; others worked to complete the Flagler mansion, the White Hall, by 1901. Aside from the hotel, men found employment as caddies, chauffeurs, butlers, gardeners, and wheelchair men who earned a good living. When men were off duty, they went fishing and hunted small animals such as rabbits and opossum. They also raised chickens and planted vegetables for food. The women worked as chambermaids, laundresses, cooks, and nursemaids.

      Children attended school in Bethel Baptist Church in the Styx. Later they traveled over Lake Worth by ferry and walked to Lake Academy, a black school where Prof. J.W. Mickens was principal. They played stickball and ring plays, and they also jumped rope.

      During their free time, adults took ferryboat rides, held family picnics, and watched baseball games. Baseball in Palm Beach County began in the Styx where teams were imported to play on local teams. Black entertainers were hired for events in the

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