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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in West Palm Beach, Florida.
West Palm is the county seat of Palm Beach County.
History
When Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913) first came here in 1893, he called the Lake Worth region “a veritable paradise” and decided upon a dual plan for the area that was once the ancestral home of the Jeaga Indians. He would turn Palm Beach into a resort and he would build a commercial city across the lake for his workers. That “worker city” would become beautiful West Palm Beach.
Flagler had his city laid out in November 1893, naming the streets for native plants.
On Nov. 5, 1894 residents of the little town decided to incorporate the city of West Palm Beach. It soon became a bustling frontier town with storefronts along Clematis and Narcissus streets, and saloons lining Banyan Street. Banyan Street became as wild and well-known as any raucous town in the Wild West. It was so notorious that famed anti-alcohol crusader Carry Nation visited in 1904, wielding her Bible.
From 1920 to 1927, the city’s population quadrupled, and everything grew including the schools, the farming and sugar businesses in the Glades, the hotels and theaters.
There are a dozen palm trees native to Florida, but the iconic coconut tree is not. On January 9, 1878, the Spanish brig Providencia bound from Havana to Spain with a cargo of 20,000 coconuts ran aground just off-shore of a sparsely populated barrier island in the Lake Worth region. Local residents planted the coconuts and within a decade the area was filled with coconut palm trees. The island soon had a new name — Palm Beach.