Looking back at some of the happenings in the City of Plantation in Broward County FL gives us pause to appreciate our Plantation Florida homes even more.
The first we know about Plantation FL real estate has to do with the Tequesta tribe that inhabited South Florida from about 400 B.C. to 1700 A.D. Enter Ponce de Leon and other explorers and settlers. The ensuring conflict wiped out the Tequesta. Historic real estate in Plantation includes several “chickees”, thatched homes on stilts created by another tribe to protect themselves from the Europeans. The Seminole built these early Plantation FL homes. They were a tribe of Creek Indians originally from Georgia and Alabama. Before the 1900s, the newcomers in the area had only built a house of refuge in Fort Lauderdale real estate.
The Tequesta were the movers and the shakers of their times. They lived on the beaches and near the mouths of rivers and inlets, consuming wild vegetation, making flour from the coontie root, and eating the bounties of the waters—manatee, turtle, lobster, and fish. Excellent fishers and boatmen, they traveled to places such as Cuba. Remains of their civilization are noticeable on mounds at the 14th hole of the Plantation Country Club.
Unlike the Tequesta, the Seminole grew corn and raised cattle, pigs, and chickens. Before the U.S. government moved in on them, they lived in two-story wooden houses placed either on water or near the edge of the water. The Seminole traded with the settlers, but when the U.S. government tried to relocated Native Americans to reservations in Arkansas and Oklahoma, many Seminole were forced into the Everglades where they dug out Cypress logs for canoes to navigate the marshes.
It took two Seminole Wars for the remaining strong-willed tribes to conquer Broward County. Outsmarting Major William Lauderdale and the Tennessee Mounted Militia and outlasting eight years of warring, the Seminoles were the only residents for several decades.
A southeastern Florida survey, from Lake Worth to the Biscayne Bay, in the 1860s began the reintroduction of settlers. In 1876, the U.S. government built five houses of refuge along the Atlantic coast. They included the house in Fort Lauderdale occupied by the “barefoot mailman” who delivered mail from Palm Beach to Miami traveling along the beach.
In 1894, a stagecoach line connected Hypoluxo in Palm Beach County and Lemon City in Miami-Dade County. Before long, Henry Flagler completed the Florida East Coast Railway to Fort Lauderdale bringing more people into Broward County.
For information about real estate in the area, contact Herman Group