A couple of weeks ago our Rotonda West Homeowners Association held a presentation by the Charlotte County historian on the history of Rotonda. I’m always interested in history, especially when I am fairly new to an area. I’d read a book written by Rotonda resident Jack Alexander in 1995 called Rotonda: The Vision and the Reality so I didn’t expect there to be much I didn’t already know. As a reminder, I wrote about what I’d learned from that book in a post called The Unusual, Round Place We Call Home.
The history presentation was more than I expected. It briefly covered Florida history from much farther back and explained the role the railroads played in settling Florida after the Civil War. I’d also read several other books about Florida history, so her presentation helped connect more dots for me. I found it all utterly fascinating.
During her presentation, Dr. Jennifer Zoebelein talked about another book called Swamp Peddlers by Jason Vuic. As soon as I left the presentation, I reserved the book from the library. You know me, intensely curious. What a treasure trove of history that book is!
I wonder, if I’d read that book, as well as Condominium by John D Macdonald, BEFORE we moved to Florida, if we would made the same decision to live here. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t know about any of the history. I absolutely love living here, but both those books certainly made me question my judgment.
Rather than do a bad job summarizing the Swamp Peddlers book, here is a copy and paste of the description from the (publisher’s) University of North Caroline Press website.
What struck me in reading the book was how many places they talked about that I knew about. I could see them in my mind’s eye and remember driving through many of them. After reading this book I was able to pull together everything else I’d learned in the last 3 years about Florida into what felt like a full, cohesive story. It helped answered questions I’d thought of but never articulated as I was driving around getting to know the areas. The overwhelming feeling I had when finishing this book was gratitude for those who came before us to Florida and what they did to try to straighten out the mess created by Swamp Peddlers. Without them we wouldn’t be enjoying the life they were promised in the paradise in which we are now living.
Even today as I was meandering through Facebook, there are current posts on Rotonda’s pages asking whether there’s any chance we would ever have water access to the Gulf of Mexico through the existing canal system. After all, that was one of the selling points back at the beginning of Rotonda’s development. The answer, 52 years later, is probably not.
My mind boggled at the audacity of the swamp peddlers. Some of them were flat out crooks and con men. Others, like the Mackle Brothers who are credited with creating Port Charlotte and North Port (along with other huge Florida developments) seemed to have honorable intentions. But the opportunities to make money with the land sale and real estate practices of the day were untested and fraught with unknown pitfalls. Florida was the wild, wild west of the mid-20th century.
Few could anticipate all the problems looming on the horizon from the fledgling and booming land sales industry. Some did, however, such as the county officials of Palm Beach and Martin Counties on the east coast of Florida. Together with the Army Corp of Engineers, they saw through Joe Klein’s vision for Rotonda East and essentially ran him out of town. He picked up and moved the round community vision, lock, stock, and $40,000 tabletop model to the Cape Haze Penninsula on the Gulf Coast. Here I sit, nearly 60 years later, looking over one of the canals represented on that model. It’s kind of a miracle when you know that history of the development.
The 1950s and 1960s peaked unprecedented interest and inexpensive access to enormous amounts of raw land. An astonishing number of hucksters and fraudsters as well as a few legitimate companies were able to elbow their way into a market that seemed limitless. The government, acting as regulators, didn’t even know what laws to consider, let alone pass. By the time the fraud began surfacing, enormous damage had been done, to people’s trust, their finances, the environment, to local governments left holding the bag, and to the quality of life itself. Those local governments and the lot and home owners were forced to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
One of the things that impressed me the most (not in a good way) about the whole sordid story, was the hundreds of thousands (probably millions but I couldn’t confirm that number) of acres of land that were bought up and divided into 80’ x 125’ (.23 of an acre) lots. In 2006, the West Coast Florida Chapter of Appraisal Institute published a report titled A Brief Florida Real Estate History. As of the date of publication it stated that some of the “ghost” (antiquated, obsolete and existing only on paper) subdivisions from the 1960s cover some 1,600,000 acres with 2,100,000 lots. That is hard to even imagine!
It turns out that one of the egregious mistakes these 1960s developers made was platting incredibly huge areas of land and selling them willy nilly without an organized infrastructure growth plan. That is the answer to one of my unexpressed questions. While driving through some of the outer areas of North Port when we first arrived in Florida and were looking for a home, I wondered why there were (still) so few houses and so many empty lots. The Mackle Brothers divided up the thousand and thousands of acres they bought in Port Charlotte and North Port (originally North Port Charlotte) into nearly 200,000 lots, all connected by road. Those lots were sold to folks as investments, not necessarily as places to build homes in the immediate future. So the few houses that were built soon after the lot sold could be miles apart from each other. That made it damn near impossible to provide cost effective services and community infrastructure to those homes.
The Mackle Brothers learned their lesson early on. Subdivisions they developed thereafter were divided and sold from a central point outward. But most of the other developers didn’t give a damn about infrastructure and quality of life in the area after they sold the lots. Some blatantly admitted it in lawsuits that were filed over and over and over again. Lot owners had little recourse since, as mentioned earlier, there were no laws against unethical behavior lawmakers never expected. And that contributed to the fiasco of the entire installment land sales scam, from which problems still linger.
I’m still enjoying exploring the stories of this area we now call home. What I’ve learned so far has only whet my appetite for more. This won’t, I’m sure, be the last post I share on Florida history that fascinates me.
P.S. In the research about Florida land sales in the 1960s I came across the story of how Walt Disney chose and bought the swampland that Disneyworld is built on. That too, is fascinating, but I’ll save that for another time.
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