The Mother of Miami
A thousand years ago, the Tequesta Native Americans lived in Biscayne Bay country; today, we call its major city Miami, and it’s now the largest city in Florida. If you come to stay in one of the miami luxury hotels, you’ll quickly recognize this metropolis is a cosmopolitan 21st century city, known as an international center for a variety of businesses: from the arts to global trade to entertainment and finance, etcetera. In the last eight years, buildings have literally skyrocketed with the construction of over fifty skyscrapers rising higher than four hundred feet. But what’s the story behind one of the United State’s largest cities? Who founded it? The answer might surprise you: Miami is the only major city in the U.S. to be founded by a woman, Julia Tuttle.
Julia DeForest Tuttle lived from 1849 to 1898; in her short 50 years she was a business woman and a citrus farmer who owned the land on which Miami was founded. In 1867, Tuttle married at the age of eighteen and had two children with Frederick Tuttle, an owner of an iron foundry. She visited Southern Florida when she was twenty-six (1875) to see an orange grove that her father bought. Her husband died when when she was just thirty-seven, and she decided to sell the iron foundry and move to Biscayne Bay. She used the money from sale to purchase 640 acres on the spot where Miami now stands. She decided to make a city to attract a railroad to her area. She wrote many letters to the railroad, but it wasn’t until a freeze destroyed most of the orange crop of Florida in the Central and Northern areas and her crops were spared, that her letters were remembered. The Florida East Coast Railroad was extended to Biscayne Bay, originating Miami in the year 1896. At this time, the Mother of Miami was 49 years old.
Tuttle died the following year at the age of fifty, but not before bestowing upon Florida the legacy of its largest city, a town that grew in one hundred years from a population of one thousand to a metropolitan pop. of over five million. All by writing a letter to the owner of a railroad. The man she wrote to, Henry Flagler, became known as the Father of Miami… but that’s another story.
Related posts: