Dade County FlArchives History - Books .....Miami's First Subdivision, Chapter 2 1965
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 April 1, 2009, 6:20 pm

Book Title: Memories Of Old Miami

CHAPTER TWO
Miami's First Subdivision

    I WAS only eight, but I have good reason to remember Miami's first
subdivision - Highland Park - and hearing Doc Dammers auction off the lots from
the floor of a one-mule wagon.

    That was 54 years ago, in 1910. The main reason that I remember it so well,
I guess, is not because of Doc Dammers but because there was a balloon ascension
to draw a crowd.

    (The area covered by Highland Park subdivision is now bordered by Jackson
Memorial Hospital on the west, by NW Seventh Avenue on the east, NW 20th Street
on the north, and touching NW 11th Street on the south.)

    This area since has been swallowed by a rapidly expanding city, but in 1910
it was in the country. Wagner Creek went through part of the property. The rest
of the area was covered by Dade county pines and palmettos - and there were
rattlesnakes, too.

    We had moved to Allapattah just the year before. My father, C. M. Frazure,
bought a 22-acre farm on NW 28th Street just east of 22nd Avenue, where we lived
until 1913 when he sold out to James Donn, Sr. Dad was a railroad man and a road
builder. It had taken him four years to learn that he wasn't a farmer and had
little prospect of becoming one.

    We moved to Dade County in 1905 from Kissimmee where I was born. The next
year we rented a three-story frame house in Buena Vista, owned by Z. T. Merritt,
county clerk. The house burned in 1909.

    Everything we owned burned up, including our cat. I remember it very well.
It was a cold day. A spark from the chimney ignited lichens on the shingle roof.
We managed to get ourselves out, and the cat, too, but the cat ran back into the
house and we never saw the animal again.

    When we lived on NW 28th St., I used to ride a bicycle to school in Miami,
where the main post office now stands. We - my three brothers and I - came to
town on what was known then as Allapattah Drive. We followed what is now NW 17th
Avenue to NW 15th Street Road, then swung along the west and south sides of the
old Miami Country Club golf course, where county and state administrative
buildings are now located. A white limestone road paralleled the Miami River to
11th Street, then followed the Wagner Creek to the Miami River at Fifth Street.
Beyond where we lived Allapattah Drive faded into a winding wagon road that
disappeared in the sawgrass and willows of the Humbugus and Pokey-Moonshine
sections — now Hialeah and Miami Springs.

    Those were in the days before drainage, and during the rainy season of
September and October a part of the road used to go under water. We used to have
to wade part of the way and push our bicycles along. The swayback bridge that
used to cross Wagner Creek would be under water. It's a wonder the flooded creek
didn't wash the bridge away.

    Tussocks of muck and sawgrass, some of them three and four feet in diameter,
used to float down the creek when the glades flooded, and sometimes there'd be a
rattlesnake coiled up in the center of one, getting a free ride.

    It was not long after we began riding to Miami to attend school that the
Highland Park subdivision opened. The developer, F. C. B. LeGro - somebody
nicknamed him Fresh Country Butter LeGro - put on an advertising and promotion
campaign. A big crowd was attracted by the balloon ascension. The auctioneer, E.
E. Dammers, was to become famous during the Boom. As George Merrick's auctioneer
Doc sold millions of dollars worth of Coral Gables property and in 1925 became
Coral Gables' first mayor.

    Since Allapattah Road passed along the south border of the subdivision, my
brothers and I could see what was going on, and we were there bright and early
on the Saturday that the balloon ascension was scheduled.

    To fill the balloon with smoke, they dug a long trench, running from
southeast to northwest, the direction of the prevailing wind. They covered the
trench, except for openings at each end, with boards and sand. At the southeast,
end they built a fire with pine knots and poured kerosene on the fire. The
balloon was set up over the other end of the trench. The wind blew the smoke and
hot air down the trench and into the balloon.

    Several men held onto lines attached to the balloon as it became inflated
and wanted to rise. I held onto one of the lines myself. It was a thrill to a
boy. I had never seen anything like this before.

    After the balloon was filled with smoke and hot air and completely inflated
the lines were released, the balloon rose quickly, carrying with it a parachute
from which a man dangled from a trapeze or swing.

    The balloon rose a thousand feet or more, drifting to the northwest. Then
the man released the parachute, which billowed open like a giant umbrella and
dropped safely to the ground. It was really exciting. Few persons in the crowd
had ever seen a parachute jump - if you could call it a jump.

    As soon as the parachute and man were separate from the balloon it turned
upside down and drifted toward the earth, belching a stream of the blackest
smoke that you've ever seen.

    The parachute dropped to the ground in the vicinity of what is now the NW
27th Avenue and 30th Street intersection. The balloon fell into a flooded
sawgrass prairie, about where the jai-alai fronton is now located, at 37th
Avenue and 35th Street.

    They had to put muck shoes on a mule before they could go out in a wagon and
pick up the balloon. You don't see muck shoes any more. A muck shoe was a piece
of flat perforated metal about a foot square. One was attached to each hoof so
that the mule wouldn't bog up in the muck.

    It was an odd thing, to see a mule paddling through the sawgrass in muck
shoes - but that was the only way the animal could go into the glades in those
days.

    All of that area where the jai-alai fronton is now located used to be
sawgrass prairie, and it was under water during the late summer and fall. But at
that time all of that area where Hialeah and Miami Springs are now located used
to go under water every year.

    That balloon ascension did the trick in getting out a crowd. They came out
to Highlands Park from Miami in bicycles - which we called "wheels" in those
days - and in buggies and hacks (the only hacks you see any more are those at
St. Augustine and in Nassau.)

    Once the crowd got out there, Doc Dammers got up in his wagon and began
auctioneering. I remember him as a medium-sized, balding man with a voice much
bigger than he was. Doc drove his mule from lot to lot, auctioning them off at
from $250 to $350 apiece. That was a lot of money in those days.

    When the crowd began to lose interest, Doc would reach down into a sugar
barrel and come up with a piece of China - a cup and saucer, a plate or a bowl,
and then he'd call out a number. Anyone holding the lucky tickets, given out as
the people arrived from town, would walk up and receive the article from Doc's
hands.

    Most of the people at the auction were strangers to me. I suppose a lot of
them were winter visitors. Many of them were well dressed, like the guests we
used to see at Henry M. Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel. The men wore derbies and
smoked cigars. The women wore long dresses - dresses that almost dragged on the
ground - and immense hats.

    Doc Dammers was as great an auctioneer as his reputation claims for him, for
he sold out those lots in a hurry, and pretty soon cottages were going up all
through the pine-woods.

    Looking back, it seems that Miami really started to grow after the Highland
Park subdivision began building up. Other subdivisions soon followed. There were
Miramar, on Biscayne Bay just north of the new Miami Herald building, and Point
View, on Biscayne Bay just south of the Miami River. The biggest subdivision of
them all, however, was the Lawrence Estate Land Company development just west of
the Miami River.

    We didn't realize it at the time, but Highland Park really started
something. The population of Miami and the nearby communities-Lemon City, Little
River, Buena Vista. Allapattah, Coconut Grove and Larkin (now South Miami)-had a
total population of not more than ten or twelve thousand in 1910.

    The area's population passed the 40,000 mark in 1920, quadrupling itself in
a decade.


Additional Comments:

Extracted from:

"Memories of Old Miami"
by Hoyt Frazure as told to Nixon Smiley
Reprinted from a series of articles first appearing in Sunday Magazine of The
Miami Herald

Undated, but circa 1965

File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/fl/dade/history/1965/memories/miamisfi34nms.txt

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