The Swamp Peddlers

How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

Jason Vuic

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469663166
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Florida has long been a beacon for retirees, but for many, the American dream of owning a home there was a fantasy. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" hawked billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded home site that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others—sprawling communities with no downtowns, little industry, and millions of residential lots.
 
In The Swamp Peddlers, Jason Vuic tells the raucous tale of the sale of residential lots in postwar Florida. Initially selling cheap homes to retirees with disposable income, by the mid-1950s developers realized that they could make more money selling parcels of land on installment to their customers. These "swamp peddlers" completely transformed the landscape and demographics of Florida, devastating the state environmentally by felling forests, draining wetlands, digging canals, and chopping up at least one million acres into grid-like subdivisions crisscrossed by thousands of miles of roads. Generations of northerners moved to Florida cheaply, but at a huge price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; poorly-regulated development begat environmental destruction, culminating in the perfect storm of the 21st-century subprime mortgage crisis.

CHAPTER ONE

$10 Down, $10 a Month!

The idea from the beginning … was to sell lots, nothing more. No forethought was given to the possibility that someone might actually want to live there, no consideration given to streets or schools or sewers.… Selling, not building, was how these developers measured their success.

—PAUL REYES, Exiles in Eden

They called it the “Ninety-Mile Prairie,” the vast expanse of scrub brush and grassland stretching from south central Florida, above Lake Okeechobee, to a handful of ports on the Gulf. This was cattle land, a mucky, barren, rattlesnake-infested, palmetto-bushed terrain where in the 1800s grizzled cowboys, known locally as cow hunters, herded livestock onto steamships bound not for northern markets but for Cuba. Cows roamed freely here, malnourished and emaciated, while Florida’s unique breed of cowboys, wrote Frederic Remington, had “none of the bilious fierceness and rearing plunge” of their Western brethren.¹ In fact, many had stolen whole herds—range wars were common in Florida—while some, such as cattle baron and slave owner Jacob Summerlin (who also cofounded Orlando) spent the Civil War selling “scrub cows” to both the Union and the Confederacy.²

In 1862, Summerlin and his associates established a dock on the north shore of Charlotte Harbor, several miles inland from the Gulf, for the express purpose of loading ships in secret to break the Union blockade. However, Summerlin’s ships weren’t going to the Confederacy because no one could pay what the Cubans could pay, a reported $30 a head, in gold Spanish doubloons.³ Summerlin would die in 1893 after a long and prosperous life, but “Charlotte Harbor Town” lived on as the first settlement in what became Charlotte County. For years, it was nothing more than a remote hamlet on either side of an old Indian trail, the future U.S. Route 41, where settlers bought supplies and cowboys brought their livestock to the dock.

Across the water on the south shore of Charlotte Harbor was a jutting bit of pine and wetland called Punta Gorda, which was Spanish for “Fat Point.” In the mid-1800s, Cuban fishermen sometimes visited there, but in 1883 the land passed to a Kentucky colonel and carpetbagger named Isaac Trabue, who platted a town with a port and persuaded the Florida Southern Railroad to build a terminal there in 1886. The railroad would become part of the “Plant System,” owned by northern industrialist Henry Plant, who, in addition to building train and steamship lines from Canada to British Honduras, would open or acquire eight Florida hotels, including one built in 1887 in Punta Gorda.

Charlotte County, Florida. Map created by Erin Greb Cartography.

Although not as luxurious as Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel, which was a quarter-mile-long, minaret-festooned showpiece featuring the state’s first elevator, the Punta Gorda Hotel was an appealing though utilitarian structure of 150 rooms. Built to draw tourists to one of the best fishing grounds in the state, the hotel housed over 3,300 visitors in 1887, including such luminaries as Andrew Mellon, John Wanamaker, and W. K. Vanderbilt, among others, but closed following an economic depression in 1896 and didn’t reopen until 1902.

The hotel and, to some extent, the communities of Charlotte Harbor never recovered. Some industry remained there, mostly fishing and phosphate shipping, but competition from ranchers in Texas and Central America meant that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the area’s cattle export industry had dried up. Thus, with few tourists and even fewer exports to speak of, Charlotte Harbor spent the next fifty years in a stasis, for while the population of Florida grew 424 percent between 1900 and 1950, to nearly 2.8 million, Punta Gorda’s grew just 37.8 percent, to 1,950. Charlotte Harbor Town (or simply Charlotte Harbor as the locals called it) remained an unincorporated settlement with fewer than 500 people.

Impeding growth, to a large extent, was the “wet-dry” nature of local lands. To the east was prairie, but north and south of Charlotte Harbor was a coastal strip of what scientists call “hydric pine flatwoods,” a low-lying, lightly forested, seasonally flooded savannah of palmetto bushes, cabbage palms, and slash pine for which drainage of any kind was poor. It was so poor, in fact, that for much of the region’s June through September rainy season, Southwest Florida was one big bog, receiving more rain in four months (35 inches, on average) than the damp Great Lakes states Wisconsin (32.6), Michigan (32.8), and Minnesota (27.3) received in a year. Rain, however, was one thing. Porous soil with high sand content, sitting on a shell-filled substrate, was another. This meant that instead of being absorbed, water pooled in the summer between one and two feet in places, then evaporated completely in the winter. By early spring, the land was dry enough for brush fires.

“It is amazing what dreary miles there are of these pine barrens,” wrote one discomfited visitor in 1918, “arid level wastes with an undergrowth of palmetto scrub … and stretches of shallow bog pools. The roads are often under water in places,” and “the utter absence of landmarks make[s] it unsafe for the stranger to wander from the beaten path.”⁴ Under these conditions, year-round agriculture was impossible, so companies used the land for logging of old growth cypress and mature pines and for the tapping of pines for resin. The latter practice was, in the 1800s, among Florida’s largest industries: turpentine and pine tar production for hundreds of commercial uses, such as soap, paint, varnish, solvents, lacquers, furniture polish, lamp oil, and sealants.

It was a nasty business, in which freed slaves and other African Americans, many of whom were prisoners, would cut the bark off trees in three- and four-foot sections to score the wood underneath. This would “bleed” the trees of resin, which workers collected in buckets and took to so-called turpentine camps for distillation. There were several such camps north of Charlotte Harbor, including one called Southland near the present-day community of El Jobean. “It was a horrible place,” remembered one local resident. “The camp leased prisoners, all black. They were treated like slaves. Several were killed in beatings or died in forest fires from the pine resin dripping from the trees.… It was uncivilized.”⁵

Although installment land sales companies promoted Florida as a tropical paradise, the lots they sold were typically located in hydric pine forests like this one, barren former cattle ranches, and sometimes swamps. Courtesy of Chris M. Morris/Flickr.

Not only that, but Florida’s turpentine camps were incredibly destructive environmentally. Whole swathes of flatwoods were either bled out or cut down, leaving scarred, swampy, denuded, near-worthless wastelands in their place. That is, unless you could sell the land sight unseen to naive buyers, which is what Chicago real estate agent and land developer John M. Murdock did in 1912. Murdock’s empire was a modest stretch of subdivided farmsteads approximately six miles north of Charlotte Harbor, which he advertised to northerners as a “vast area of fertile farms and gardens” where vegetables grew “every month of the year.”⁶

Residents soon learned, however, that growth was impossible in the summer months, when the “Murdock Farms Colony” was underwater. Complaints proliferated and inhabitants left, which prompted a panicked Murdock to persuade county officials to construct more than a dozen large canals from the shores of Charlotte Harbor north to the county line. Unfortunately, the canals were too deep, causing a drop in the water table, which meant Murdock had exchanged too much water in the summer for not enough water in the winter. The colony collapsed, and in 1916, Murdock abandoned his debts and his family and fled with his secretary to Jacksonville.

Over the next few decades, the lands of north Charlotte County, including those of John M. Murdock and those of the turpentine companies, passed into the hands of a former railroad telegrapher named Arthur “A. C.” Frizzell. An old Alabama farm boy with a taste for liquor and a talent for making money, Frizzell began in 1918 with twenty acres and a turpentine still, which he parlayed into a cattle and land empire of enormous size. The trick, he found, was in buying fallow land from lumber companies—land with few trees but thousands and thousands of stumps, which he “grubbed out” (using leased prison labor) then sold for their resin. “When the turpentine and lumber were gone,” remembered a Frizzell family member, “the big companies wanted to get rid of the land so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it.” Therefore, they sold it to [A. C.] for fifty cents an acre. “In time, he had a lot of land with nothing but stumps and palmettos.”⁷

As fate would have it, though, the stumps turned out to be a goldmine because they contained concentrated slivers of extremely valuable pine resin known as “fatwood.” To get to the fatwood, Frizzell’s men pulled stumps from the ground using a jerry-rigged car as a tractor. Then, they burned the stumps in a kiln—which, actually, was a hole they’d dug lined with sheet metal, covered in wood and sand for smoldering—and, as the stumps began to sweat, resin would drip through a pipe and into a bathtub. From there, it was poured into barrels and sold. The process was painstaking at best, which is why turpentine companies didn’t do it, but old pine stumps made A. C. Frizzell a rich man.

He grew even richer during the Depression, when, as the stumps ran out, he planted his land with hardy Bahia grass, which grew well in Florida, and went into the cattle business. He had so many cows and so many ranch hands that at one point he began paying the men in “Frizzell dollars” good only at his Murdock store. When a bridge spanning Charlotte Harbor opened in 1921 and the Tamiami Trail from Tampa to Miami was completed in 1928, he went into the auto business, opening two Ford dealerships and a tractor dealership, plus a lumberyard. With upwards of 100,000 acres, by the 1940s Frizzell was one of the largest landowners in Florida, and on occasion he could be seen wearing a suit and a Stetson hat and being driven about in a Ford by a black assistant named Sam.

Frizzell lived well until his wife died in 1953 and he lost interest in the business, selling the bulk of his land, a reported 78,000 acres, for $3.6 million in 1954.⁸ The buyer was a Canadian company called the Chemical Research Corporation, a one-time petroleum business that had bought so much land in Florida and become so Florida-focused that it changed its name to the Florida Canada Corporation. Why? Because this was the boom, the second great boom of frenzied land sales in Florida in the twentieth century. The first had come in the 1920s, when a bevy of dreamers, schemers, real estate agents, land developers, government officials, bankers, and even confidence men had driven the state’s land prices into the stratosphere.

Theories as to why this happened abound, but suffice it to say, the Roaring Twenties were a decade-long period of sustained economic growth. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than in the countryside. They were earning more than ever and retiring with healthy pensions more than ever, and thanks to mass-produced automobiles such as the Model T, they were mobile. They had “leisure time,” a concept unknown to all but the richest Americans until well into the 1900s. And, with the completion of U.S. Route 1 from Maine to Miami in 1915 and the above-mentioned Tamiami Trail, they could spend it in Florida, or even live in Florida—where beginning in 1924 there was no state income tax—in some of the first modern planned communities in the United States.

Unlike in earlier generations, when Henry Plant and other industrialists built perhaps two dozen hotel-spas in Florida for America’s super elite, who were tourists, these new communities were year-round and decidedly middle class. In 1925, for example, Cleveland’s Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers developed a 2,900-acre stretch of Venice, Florida, as a Mediterranean-style retirement community for its workers. Likewise, the settlement of El Jobean in northwest Charlotte County began as a defunct turpentine camp purchased in 1923 by Boston land developer Joel Bean—hence the anagram El Jobean—who mapped out six hexagonal “wards,” each with a one-hundred-foot-wide circular boulevard with a civic center in the middle. In both instances, huge tracts of farmland, cattle land, orange groves, and/or scrub brush were drawn up into subdivisions, officially platted, broken up into thousands of half-acre, quarter-acre, and 80′ × 125′ lots, then sold.

“Streets are rapidly being marked and graded,” exclaimed an ad by the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Jason Vuic
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Epigraph
• Introduction: The Swamp Peddlers
• Chapter One: $10 Down, $10 a Month!
• Chapter Two: The Land Giants
• Chapter Three: Into the Cattle Chute
• Chapter Four: The Last Paradise
• Chapter Five: The First-Mortgage Frauds
• Chapter Six: Generally Defective Communities
• Chapter Seven: Foreclosure Tours R’ Us
• Epilogue: The Last of the Best of Florida
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index