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Florida Travel and Tourist Information

Florida's Indefinable Charm


( Originally Published Mid 1930's )

There is only one way to know Florida. That is to live there. Most winter tourists see little or nothing of the real Florida. Only the traveler who embarks upon a real voyage of exploration ever gets more than a superficial view of the land of perpetual youth, though even the most casual visitor comes under the spell of Florida's never-ending charm. The longer one stays in Florida the longer one wants to stay. Most of the folk who call Florida home today came first as casual tourists and never went back home.

The charm of Florida cannot be put on paper. Once felt, however, it lingers with its victim so long as he draws breath. It is a composite of an infinite variety of physical elements blended with an undefinable something for which there is no word in our language, something almost spiritual in its power to instill that sense of general well-being, the feeling that all's right with the world and with one's soul which the old Greeks called "euphoria."

If we cannot analyze this spiritual charm of Florida it is possible, at least, to assemble and examine the physical elements which combine to make Florida what it is.

Look at the map. Here lies Florida, farthest south of all of the forty-eight states. Its northern boundary is 100 miles farther south than the southernmost boundary of California; the tip of the Florida peninsula at Key West lies lower on the map than the southeast corner of Texas. The westerly sweeping curve of the Atlantic coast swings Florida directly south of Ohio and Indiana. Its easternmost shore is miles farther west than is Buffalo, N. Y.; its western boundary lies just a few miles farther east than Chicago.

Florida does not lie in the tropics; at its farthest south it is still a hundred miles and more north of the Tropic of Cancer. That brings its latitude, however, several hundred miles farther south than the peninsula of Italy, more nearly to that of Cairo, in Egypt, or of Shanghai, which its climate more nearly resembles.

Florida is more than 450 miles wide from east to west along its northern boundary; nearly 150 miles across the bulge of the Peninsula. From north to south, Fernandina to Key West, it is more than 500 miles. That makes Florida one of the largest states of the Union. There are only twenty larger; only one of them, Georgia, lying East of the Mississippi. Florida is larger than Pennsylvania, larger than Iowa or Wisconsin, than Virginia and Maryland together, than all of New England, if you leave off Aroostook County, Maine. It covers nearly 58,000 square miles, more than 37Y2 million acres. Thirty-five million of those acres are land, two and a half million of them fresh water lakes and rivers. Only Minnesota, a third larger than Florida, has more lakes than Florida's thirty thousand.

Occupying one fiftieth of the area of the United States, Florida is the permanent home of only one eightieth of the nation's population. Of its 1,606,842 inhabitants counted by the state census of 1935, 1,139,063 are white. The colored halfmillion includes a scant 500 Seminole Indians, all that remain of the renegade natives who rebelled against the Whites under the leadership of Osceala, the half-breed Chief who was the son of William Powell, an English planter, and whose followers fled to the fastnesses of the Everglades rather than accept deportation with the rest of their tribe to the reservations in the West.

The Seminoles are the only race in Florida of which it can be said that they are all natives of the state. Nearly half of the Negroes, more than four-tenths of them, and more than half of the white population of Florida were born in other states. Forty-two percent of these white "outlanders" who have made Florida their home came from the regions lying north of Virginia and east of the Rocky Mountains; most of the rest from the nearby states of Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and Tennessee.

Between 1925 and 1935 the population of Florida increased by almost one-half. In no other state has anything approaching this gain in population occurred in a similar period in recent times. The rush to Florida has not been paralleled in our history since the grand rush of settlers into Oklahoma in 1888 when the lands of the old Indian Territory were thrown open to settlement. They came to Florida from everywhere and for the same reason that they flocked to Oklahoma, that they crowded into each of the states of the West in turn as one after the other became accessible. The pioneer instinct which is every American's heritage drove and is still driving them to the last of the pioneer states.

So far we have spoken only of the permanent settlers in Florida. In midwinter the white population of the State is nearly trebled, for a few weeks. In the four months between November and April more than two million visitors from the North come into Florida and leave it again. That is, most of them leave it; enough stay behind every Winter, or come back later as residents, to continue Florida's growth in population at a rate which is steadily accelerating. Florida is busier than any other part of the country in building homes for new, permanent residents.

What brings these folk to Florida, these holiday-seeking millions, these hundreds of thousands of permanent settlers? The answer is simple. They come to Florida for the same reason that people migrate to any other place. That is because there is something there which they want and which they can get more readily, more satisfactorily or less expensively than they can get it anywhere else. To understand Florida, then, and its people, we must see what these things are which Florida offers that these folk cannot get at home.

What, in short, are the commodities which Florida has to sell and which the rest of America travels so far to buy?

At the top of the list one item stands out. It is the sole attraction of most of the temporary visitors, a major part of the lure which has drawn most of the permanent residents and still holds them in Florida.

That is the Florida climate.

Florida is warm in winter when the rest of the nation is shivering or freezing. It is green when the North is blanketed by snow. Its lakes and rivers are ice-free, and the seas which wash its coasts are mild in action and in temperature when the northern coasts are storm-bound by icy gales. When the lands of the Pacific are wrapped in fog, Florida glitters and basks in the warmth of her winter sunshine.

And not only in Winter does the lure of Florida's climate attract and hold her people. So far from being intolerable, midsummer Florida's climate draws increasing numbers, by tens of thousands every year, from the sweltering midlands of the Cotton Belt and the prairies of the wheat lands, to luxuriate in the cooling breezes of her Gulf and Atlantic coasts and to enjoy to the full (and at half the winter cost) the wide, free spaces of her glistening beaches and the tonic of Florida's clean, bright sunshine which her winter visitors of a few months earlier have sought and found.

Lest it savor too much of the "booster" spirit to discuss Florida's climate in glittering generalities, suppose we look briefly at some facts and figures which have been supplied by the United States Weather Bureau from its sixty-five years of official records. Much has been said and written about Florida's rainfall, and scoffed at by the inhabitants of less favored regions. California's twenty-two inches of rainfall a year, so inadequate as to drive its cities hundreds of miles for their water supply and to leave great areas arid deserts, is less than half of Florida's thirty-five-year average of fifty-three inches, falling chiefly from April to October. Yet in spite of this great volume of fresh water, which keeps Florida's thirty thousand lakes and two hundred rivers full to overflowing, and releases from its fertile soil the elements of its lush, green, year-'round vegetation, the records of thirty-five years show that the average number of entirely clear days each year is 162 and the average number of even partly rainy days is only 105 in the entire year.

In the matter of temperature Florida has its occasional extremes. The highest temperatures ever recorded in Florida in the warmest months of the year, which are June and July, are no higher than those often recorded in Boston, New York, Chicago and many inland cities. The average temperature for the entire state for 1936, the last year for which complete data are available as this is written, was 71 degrees; the highest was an July 7 when the thermometer at De Funiak Springs, an inland town in West Florida, touched 103 degrees. The January average temperature for South Florida was 63, for North Florida 54; the July average for the whole state was 81.8 degrees.

"But, speaking of climate, what about hurricanes?" the reader may inquire at this point. Here are the facts about hurricanes.

No tropical cyclone or wind of hurricane force has ever occurred in Florida, in the 50 years since official records have been kept, between the months of November and June. Of the fifty-six hurricanes and near-hurricanes occurring in that period, thirty-six occurred in September and October, all but three of the others in June, July and August. Three were in November. Here is a quotation from an official report on Florida hurricanes prepared by the United States Weather Bureau:

"The chances of a hurricane reaching the Florida coast in any given year are about one in four for the East Coast and one in two for the West Coast. It should be said, however, that these storms are much more likely to occur on the lower East Coast, extreme lower West Coast, and the Northwest Coast. The upper East Coast section, in which Jacksonville is located, and the middle West Coast section, in which Tampa and St. Petersburg are located, have been relatively free from hurricanes, and the chances of a hurricane occurring in those sections in any given year are very slight."

It should be apparent that Florida hurricanes, so far as they are anything to be afraid of, are essentially bugaboos. Florida folk have no fear of them. They know, first, that the chance of a hurricane striking any given point is remote. The U. S. Weather Bureau calculates Jacksonville's hurricane chances at one in fifty, those of Palm Beach and Miami and Fort Myers at one in twenty, of Tampa one in thirty and of Pensacola and Key West at one in ten. Moreover, the courses of these West Indian cyclones which occasionally brush the Florida coast conform so regularly to a fixed pattern that it is always possible for the Weather Bureau to give, and it does give, from three to four days warning that a hurricane is approaching a particular region. Only eight of the hurricanes that reached the Florida coast in the last fifty years are classed by the Weather Bureau as great storms. Storms of such unusual violence as the one which ripped up the railroad tracks across the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935, the experts of the Weather Bureau say, are likely to occur not oftener than once in a century, while proper construction of buildings provides ample security against loss of life and property for hurricanes of less intensity. Reporting on the Miami hurricane of September, 1926, and the West Palm Beach hurricane of September, 1928, which rank with the greatest on record in so far as wind velocity and loss of life and property are concerned, the Weather Bureau report says that the evidence clearly indicates that hurricanes of major intensity do not cause serious damage to properly constructed buildings.

This statement does not apply to buildings near an ocean beach, where foundations may be undermined or the beach badly eroded by storm tides. Several substantial houses near the ocean at Miami Beach were undermined and collapsed in the hurricane of September 18, 1926, but substantial buildings only one block from the ocean escaped serious structural damage. Practically all buildings were damaged by water, resulting from broken windows, doors or from damaged roofs. In Miami there were several frame residences, with shingle roofs, which were erected when the city was first laid out, in 1896. These houses escaped, not only structural damage, but serious water damage, while many hundreds of concrete-block houses of flimsy construction were demolished. The same conditions were observed at Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and Lake Worth, which were directly in the path of the September 16, 1928, hurricane. Office buildings of the better type, ranging in height from 10 to 20 stories, were damaged principally by water. There were a number of substantial residences that were seriously damaged by debris from other buildings or by falling trees, but, with these exceptions, the writer observed no substantially constructed buildings in which the occupants were not safe during the entire duration of the Miami and West Palm Beach hurricanes. In Key West, there are considerable numbers of frame buildings that have withstood all the hurricanes of the last 55 years at that place without serious damage. One frame structure on the Government reservation has safely passed through all the Key West hurricanes since 1846.

Observations of the storm areas of the severe hurricanes on the East Coast of Florida in 1926, 1928 and 1929 warrant the following statement:

"If a building is properly constructed, including the proper type of roof and roofing material, and is securely anchored to the proper kind of foundation, it will not sustain serious struc tural damage in a hurricane of major intensity. If, in addition to the proper construction, all windows, doors, and vents are protected by storm shutters, the building should withstand strong hurricane winds with practically no damage. Such a building can be constructed at only a moderate increase of cost above that for the usual type of construction, and the saving on storm insurance will repay the extra cost in a few years' time."

Not long ago one of the authors, arriving one morning in Chicago's Union Station, observed a family group sitting huddled together on a waiting-room seat and occasionally casting apprehensive glances at the hurrying crowd that streamed pass them. Late in the afternoon on the same day, returning to catch his train, he saw the same group still there, in conversation with a railroad official, whom he knew.

"Those folks have never seen Chicago," the official said. "They had ten hours to wait far their West-bound train on their way from Ohio to Denver. They have sat in the waiting room all day because they have read so much in the newspapers about bandits on the streets of Chicago that they are afraid to go out of the station."

Florida hurricanes are much like Chicago bandit outbreaks. Their occasional occurrences do limited damage over a highly restricted area and occasion no concern to the great mass of residents who go about their business as usual without giving them a thought. They are news, when they do happen, just as a snow-storm that breaks up the Rose Bowl festival in Southern California is news. News is the record of the unusual event, and the more unusual the greater its news value. Yet there are some folk who, like that Ohio family in the Chicago Union Station, are afraid to go to Florida because they once read news of a hurricane.

For the vast majority of Americans, however, the remote menace of possible hurricanes is no deterrent. They all want to go to Florida, and, sooner or later, most of them do. For nearly four hundred years people have been going to Florida and settling there, primarily because of the climate and of the easy, comfortable living which the climate makes possible. First the Spanish, then the French, then the English Colonists from the North and, for the past hundred years, a steadily swelling stream of tourists and settlers from all parts of the United States have flocked to Florida and found it good. Even in the primitive era when all but a narrow fringe around the edges of Florida was untracked wilderness, before modern medical science had learned how to conquer and control the endemic sub-tropical diseases, adventurous explorers and far-sighted pioneers were staking their claims and founding their homesteads in the Peninsula State. They braved the hazard of "yellow-jack," a far more serious menace up to the turn of the century than hurricanes ever were, and they accepted malaria and "break-bone fever" as not too high a price to pay for the freedom and comfort of the spacious outdoor life, a life so much easier to live than they had ever found back home, which Florida afforded them. They blazed the trail, these pioneers of the 1800's, for the great migration which began with the 1900's and which is still going on at a steadily accelerating pace. Once the disease-carrying mosquitoes were eliminated, the last barrier to the year-'round settlement and development of Florida was removed.

Winter tourists visiting Florida in the season when most insect life is dormant encounter no such pests of mosquitoes and other stinging insects as do summer visitors to the tourist resorts of the North, where outdoor life often becomes almost unendurable. That, indeed, is one of the reasons not always taken into consideration why such a large proportion of Americans are coming to prefer a winter vacation in Florida to a summer vacation in Maine or Canada. The most convincing answer to the question whether insect pests do not make life miserable is found in the statistics already quoted showing a fifty percent increase in the state's year-round population in ten years.

One of the authors travelled around Florida in the early Summer of 1937, from the middle of May to the end of June. He went into every section of the state, North and South, East and West. He penetrated into remote farming regions, the depths of the Everglades, into cypress swamps and the banks of sluggish inland rivers. He travelled through pine forests and fished in shallow lakes hidden in their depths. Everywhere he asked, "When does your mosquito season begin?" The uniform answer was that this was the mosquito season, but that the work of the State Mosquito Control Board and the cooperation of the counties and the towns was so effective that mosquitoes, except in sporadic instances and in a few regions even more remote than any which the inquirer had visited had ceased entirely to be a nuisance. In the entire course of his three-thousand mile tour of Florida the author acquired only one mosquito bite. That was in a dank, swampy jungle where the sun never penetrated.

One man's experience, of course, proves nothing. Another traveller over the same route, more susceptible to mosquitoes, might have been bitten many times. But it is offered as a fair statement of fact that, broadly speaking, mosquitoes in Florida today are no more of a pest in Summer than they are in New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the region of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. The householder in Florida needs insect screens in Summer as much as he does in Pennsylvania; but it is equally possible to spend an evening outof-doors after dark south of Miami without annoyance as at Atlantic City or anywhere on Long Island. This, also, is set down from experience.

Is Florida a comfortable place to live in the year around? One of the best answers is the fact that the habit of going hatless in Summer-the year around, for that matter-appears to the observer from outside to be more prevalent among Florida men than it is anywhere in the North. Ironically enough, one observed the entire faculty and student body of John B. Stetson University at DeLand going about the campus and the town bareheaded. And the founder of their college was a hat manufacturer! Sunstroke or heat prostration is unknown in Florida.

Medical men are in agreement that one effect of the Florida climate is to lower the blood-pressure, thus relaxing nervous tension and reducing the strain on the heart, which accounts for most of the deaths from heat apoplexy or sunstroke in the North. The Florida summer dweller wears the minimum of clothing, light in weight, light in color and loose in texture. "There is always a breeze in the shade," is a Florida axiom, which is almost literally true. There is no such thing in Florida as the sultry, humid days and steaming nights with which all dwellers in the North are familiar. From bright, dry sunshine to drenching, torrential rains, the transition is seldom but a few minutes. The rains stop as abruptly as they began and the sun blazes forth again, so swiftly are the rain clouds borne across the state by the winds of the Atlantic and the Gulf. And those same winds can be relied upon to speed the evaporation of perspiration and so keep the body cool, and to maintain their cooling circulation through the long, semi-tropical nights. The days are far shorter and the nights longer in Florida than in the higher latitudes.

What has been set down so far in the effort to make it clear why such increasing numbers of Americans are making Florida their home, either part of the year or all of the year, is an at tempt to analyze Florida's chief asset and source of revenue, its climate. For up to now, and probably for all time to come, the largest single item among the state's sources of revenue is the sale of its climate to winter visitors. The tourist business always has been and will continue to be Florida's largest industry. There are no accurate statistics of the dollar value of this industry, nor are there any precise figures of the number of tourists who enter the state for longer or shorter stays between October and April. As close an estimate as can be made, compiled from a wide variety of sources by the Florida State Chamber of Commerce, is that the tourist business for the season of 1936-37, the largest so far in the state's history, numbered nearly 2,225,000 persons, or more than the entire permanent population. Not all of these were in Florida at once, though the great majority of them spent most of the month of February. That is the time when the Florida climate is in greatest demand, the peak of the market.

Florida's chief concern as a state has for many years been to stimulate the sale of its winter climate and to encourage the development of more and better facilities for its enjoyment. Hand in hand with that effort, however, has gone the effort to induce winter visitors to establish their permanent residences in the state and to employ their capital and their energies in the development of agriculture and industries based upon the natural resources of Florida. In the past decade this latter effort has become so successful that Florida is now well embarked upon an industrial program of major proportions, while its agricultural development has acquired greater stability and expanded so rapidly and in so many directions that the vision of Florida getting rich from its contributions to the food supply of the nation, while feeding itself, is no longer a fantastic dream.

Like its tourist industry, Florida agriculture and Florida manufacturing industries have their roots in the climate. The same climate which makes Florida so attractive to the winter visitor from the frozen North nurtures the forests, fields and groves which grow the raw materials which underlie Florida's rapidly developing economic stability. The time is not far off, if indeed it is not already here, when Florida's income from the products of its factories, fisheries and farms will equal or exceed the estimated present annual income of close to $200,000,000 which its tourist trade brings in.

The earliest pioneers from the northerly English-speaking colonies who made their settlements in North and West Florida among the descendants of the Spanish colonists who had al ready been planted there for more than two centuries, carried with them the agricultural principles and methods current in Georgia and Alabama, and those still prevail in that part of Florida. They found the land for the most part thickly timbered with the fast-growing long-leaf and slash pine on the vast expanses of sandy flats; with live-oaks bearded with Spanish moss on the rolling uplands; with virgin cypress forests along the swampy river banks, and with the familiar scrub palmetto and cabbage palms everywhere.

Those who penetrated southerly into the Florida peninsula found that their exploring Spanish predecessors had left behind them two items which had been so long acclimatized as to seem native to the soil. One of these was the wild orange tree, descended, together with the wild lemon, from seeds brought to America by the conquistadores. The other was the herds of wild cattle, of the same old Spanish stock from which derived the Texas longhorn, which roamed and still roam the vast treeless, well-watered prairie, lying between the swamps of the Everglades to the South and the rising land of Florida's central ridge.

They found many other things, to be sure, which have played an important part in the building of the Florida of today; but on those three things, timber, oranges and cattle, Florida's economic growth in the past has largely depended and its present accelerated industrial development is chiefly based.

From the beginning of the settlement of Florida by white men the lumber business has been, as it still is, close to the top of its major industries. Florida still remains predominantly a forest state. Out of its 35,000,000 acres of land, more than two-thirds, 26,000,000, acres are still in forests; only 4,000,000 have as yet been converted to agriculture. The woodcutter's axe has been chopping away at Florida's timber for nearly 400 years; sawmills have buzzed in the Florida woods for more than a century; yet there still remain untouched by the axe or the saw great stands of cypress, "the wood eternal," and millions upon millions of acres of pine, not yet converted into lumber but yielding an annual quota of turpentine and rosin which makes the naval stores industry, like lumber, one of Florida's chief sources of revenue. And now Florida's pines have taken on new value, forming the basis of a great new manufacturing industry in which tens of millions of dollars have been invested, the making of paper from pine-wood pulp. Already five huge paper mills are in operation or under construction as this is written, materially strengthening the economic underpinning of the commonwealth.

Like its pines and its cypress trees, Florida's oranges and grapefruit are a product of its climate, and so, too, are the industries based thereon. It took a hundred years of horticultural experiment to develop the sweet, juicy orange of today from the sour product of the wild Spanish seedlings; half a century to produce Florida grapefruit from the primitive West Indian shaddock. And it took another quarter of a century of costly laboratory experiments and scientific research to find a way whereby the product of Florida citrus groves could be carried over from season to season, marketed in an orderly manner and the price received by the growers equitably stabilized. It was not until 1930 that successful methods of canning grapefruit, orange and grapefruit juice and other citrus products were developed commercially. Now, in 1937, there are fortythree citrus canning plants in operation in Florida, with an annual output of more than 15,000,000 dozen cans, constituting a new industry the importance of which in the economic foundations of the Florida of the future can hardly be over-estimated.

Hand in hand with these modern industrial methods for the utilization of Florida's native raw materials is going the development of the cattle industry on a scale which already suggests the possibility that Florida beef may some day compete effectively in the food markets of the East with the beef products of the western plains and prairies. Although it has been for years one of the largest cattle-growing states, Florida did not begin to figure as a factor of consequence in the national livestock markets until after 1930, when the effects of the breeding up, begun by a few enterprising stock men, through the infusion of high grade beef strains, began to be noticeable. Today Florida, with more beef cattle than Wyoming-a million and a quarter head-is producing such an increasing quantity and steadily improving quality of beef that great Chicago packing houses, assured of a continuous supply of cattle, are establishing abbatoirs and packing houses in the state.

Those, the paper industry, the citrus canning industry and the beef industry, all of which are treated more in detail elsewhere in this volume, are only the outstanding major items of Florida's swiftly expanding agricultural and industrial development. In hundreds of other directions new uses for Florida's animal, vegetable and mineral products are becoming the basis of new industries and businesses. New crops and varieties are coming out of the experimental stage and into commercial production so rapidly that the progressive increase in transportation facilities can hardly keep pace with the demand. The pressure of the growing population upon housing facilities had become so great by the middle of 1937 that Florida was beginning to experience another real estate boom, of proportions almost comparable to that which reached its climax in the Winter of 1924-25 and collapsed the following year. The new real estate boom is, however, of a different order. The other degenerated into frantic, speculative gambling in land without regard to values, as speculative as the stock-trading on margin which ended with the market crash of 1929. The present real estate boom in Florida is based upon an actual pressing demand for homes for the people who are coming to Florida faster than Florida is prepared to house them.

Why are they coming to Florida? They are coming, great and growing numbers of them, because of the new industrial and agricultural opportunities which have just been out lined, which enable thousands to heed the beckoning finger of Florida's climate and at the same time establish themselves with a means of livelihood amid its charms and comforts. They are coming, more and more of them, because the new economic order, which has resulted from the collapse of old values and the evaporation of the dream of economic security, has taught them the futility of continuing to strive for wealth only to have it taken away from them by taxation, so they are coming to Florida to live in comfort and ease while they still have the wherewithal for subsistence, to Florida where there is no state income tax, where personal and property taxes bear more lightly upon even the wealthiest than they do anywhere else in America and where men with surplus for investment are getting surer, swifter and larger returns on their capital than they can get anywhere else, and with a better chance to be allowed to keep what they get.

Every social and economic order of Americans is represented in the new migration to Florida, and every type of home, from the crudest bungalow to millionaire's palace, is in demand. Very little of the almost unprecedented volume of building operations going on in Florida in 1937 was speculative. Most of it consisted of residential construction for clients who needed and wanted to occupy the new homes. Some considerable part of it was new hotel construction at the more popular winter resorts. And an amazing volume of new construction of business buildings, schools, hospitals and other institutional or public buildings was necessitated by the very growth of the permanent population in every city and community, from the largest to the smallest.

The people of Florida thought, while the boom of the early twenties was at its height, that they were planning and building for a generation to come, highways, waterways, bridges, parks, ports and public facilities of every kind. After the bubble burst and until after recovery from the depression of the early 1930's was well under way, they feared that they had planned on too grandiose a scale, had built for a century instead of a generation ahead. Then the turn came and Florida today is trying to catch up with the needs created by its unexpected growth in all directions. In the short space of a dozen years Florida has outstripped the vision of its most enthusiastic boosters of 1925, and it has done this by no artificial inflation of prices, no specious and unfulfillable promises, but by merely telling the world the truth, in season and out of season, about Florida's climate and Florida's resources, and inviting the world to come and see for itself.

The world has accepted the invitation, and an unexpected proportion of it has come to stay.

The boom, whatever else its results, left behind it solid foundations on which to build. It left double-track railroads instead of single-track; wide paved highways instead of nar row half-paved or totally unpaved roads; reclaimed islands and beaches instead of swampy shore fronts; substantial bridges, magnificent hotels, sumptuous residences, vast irrigation and drainage works, beautified cities and, perhaps most important of all, a new spirit in the people of Florida, a realization and appreciation for the first time by the citizenry as a whole of what their state possessed and haw highly the rest of the world appraised its value. Even though all of the physical improvements had not been paid for, if palatial hotels were sold on the courthouse steps under mortgage foreclosures, if the stroke of the auctioneer's hammer signalled the rude awakening of speculative real estate developers from their rosy dreams of millions, if counties and communities found themselves bogged down under apparently hopeless loads of public debt, the physical evidences still remain of that brief epoch of grandeur when it seemed as if Florida had found Aladdin's wonderful lamp and had only to rub it to bring fairy-like, gem-studded palaces into being overnight. The roads and bridges were not torn up, the new-made islands still remained above water, the buildings still stood.

Whatever the private losses of individuals, only a sentimentalist would say that most of them did not have it coming to them, just as most of the gullible public who bought shares on the stock exchange at inflated values and on insufficient margin had none to blame but themselves for being "suckers." By summer of 1937 the last of the debt-ridden Florida communities succeeded in adjusting its obligations with its creditors in a manner satisfactory to all concerned. Now all of the bonded debt of Florida counties and cities has been scaled down or refunded on longer terms and lower interest, or both, while the increased population, winter and year around, with its concomitant increase of taxable property, has made the load quite easy to carry. The state of Florida itself has had no bonded debt for years and is prohibited under its constitution from ever having one, or from ever imposing income or inheritance taxes.

From its seven-cent gasoline tax, however, in which the counties share, the state has been able to make such vast and extensive improvements in its highway system that today the poorest main thoroughfare which any motorist encounters, unless he wanders far off the beaten track and into the remote back country, is measurably better than the best roads in Florida were when the speculative boom ended, good as those were thought to be then. It is no exaggeration to say that, considering the immense area covered and the long distances traversed in proportion to the scantiness of the state's population, Florida has as good a system of highways, and as good highways, as any state in the Union, and far better than most.

That is a part of Florida's policy of making it as easy as possible for the tourist and the prospective settler to see for himself what Florida has to show. Over these highways, in the tourist season, flows a volume of traffic so great that several new trunk roads crossing the state had to be built in 1937 in anticipation of the winter influx of visitors for the 1938 season. The road planners of even half a dozen years ago could not or did not anticipate the development of the motorbus system which now connects every part of Florida with every other part, under the control of the State Railroad Commission, and in addition provides through transportation from anywhere in Florida to anywhere else in the United States. They did not foresee the tremendous development of the motor truck, for the long-distance hauling of a large part of Florida's citrus fruit and vegetable crop to northern markets. And least of all did they foresee the trailers.

Nobody knows exactly how many of America's 50,000 motor trailers went to Florida in the Winter of 1936-37, but it is a fair guess that considerably more than half of them carried their owners and their families to the Land of Sunshine in that first season of the trailer's wide-spread popularity. That there will be more trailers in Florida each succeeding Winter is hardly to be doubted. Florida has not yet, as this is written, developed a state-wide trailer policy. Until their first season's experience demonstrated that they were not taking business away from the hotels and lodging houses there were demonstrations of hostility in many cities. But the trailers came in droves and still the hotels were overcrowded. The trailer folk turned out not to be the tramps and vagrants, gypsies of the gasoline age, which many had feared they would be, but of exactly the same social and economic classes as those to which Florida has been long accustomed to cater. Some were working folk on vacation or looking for jobs, and some were retired business men and their families, some near-millionaires, travelling in homes on wheels that cost up to as much as $25,000, and towed behind Rolls-Royces or Lincolns driven by liveried chauffeurs

Even such magnificent outfits are given the cold shoulder by Palm Beach, which allows no trailers to remain within its sacrosanct city limits for more than one hour; but the rest of Florida's communities welcome them gladly, provide municipally-operated or privately-licensed trailer parks, complete with electric connections, running water and sewers, recreation halls, cafeterias and soda fountains and even in some instances swimming pools, for fees which range from under a dollar to five dollars or more a week, depending upon the exclusiveness of the environment. There are social castes even in trailerdom.

There has, of course, been a high proportion of Federal money contributed to Florida's latest wave of physical development. Federal funds have played their full part in highway improvement; the WPA has had a hand in the building of bridges, schoolhouses, parks and recreation grounds, piers and docks and public buildings of all kinds, while the Florida community which has not got a new Post Office since 1933 is rather exceptional.

It must not be inferred, however, that Florida's present boom is based entirely upon the beneficence of Uncle Sam. Private capital in incalculable but enormous amounts has been pouring into Florida in a swelling stream, not only for the construction of new homes, hotels and business buildings and the establishment of new manufacturing industries, but for investment in strategically located real estate, not for quick speculative sale but to hold, perhaps as a hedge against inflation.

Men of millions are proving their faith in Florida's future by putting their funds into Florida land which they can carry at small cost under Florida's liberal tax laws, whenever they can pick up property lying in the path of probable future growth at bargain prices. One very large estate, for example, has been buying cheap pine timber land in anticipation of the paper mill development now in full swing, until it holds close to a half million acres, with a prospective annual net income from pulpwood of $2 an acre or more. Another enormous family estate is still pouring money into the drainage and development of thousands of acres of agricultural land in the Everglades. One nationally-known economist and financier is making his Florida investments in residential building lots in a suburban development close to one of the large cities. Individual investments since 1932 of from $100,000 up to nearly a million could be cited literally by dozens as evidence of the confidence with which capital views Florida's economic future. They are buying farm land, forest lands, city business property, residential property, factory sites and water frontage. And for every one of these large interests currently putting their money into Florida there are thousands of moderate means doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

This is a real estate boom, of an entirely different kind from the one of the middle twenties. Acting in the light of the experience of that speculative episode, Florida has enacted and is enforcing strictly a code of laws governing real estate transactions which are calculated to protect buyers against misrepresentation by high-pressure salesmen, and to punish severely any real estate broker or agent detected in crooked or unethical practices. Only brokers licensed by the state may deal in real estate and no broker gets a license unless he passes a strict examination as to his character and previous record as well as his knowledge of the business. There is, of course, no way of guaranteeing individual honesty. But the prospective buyer of Florida real estate today is certainly much better protected in dealing with one of the four thousand licensed real estate brokers than was the speculative plunger of 1925 when he was at the mercy of fifty thousand or more irresponsible "wild-cat" salesmen.

Coming back to the important question of transportation over Florida's enormous area, aviation is becoming more and more an integral part of Florida's scheme of things. There are few cities too small or too poor to have a municipal airport, with regular airmail and passenger service either a present actuality or a well-founded hope for the near future. Emergency landing fields, most of them with facilities for servicing private planes, are scattered over the Florida landscape almost as thickly as sub-divisions were in the old boom days. Indeed, many of them are what is left of boom-time real estate developments. Every city having a harbor frontage on ocean or gulf has or plans to have a seaplane port in addition to its land-plane facilities. Airmail and passenger flying services are in operation between the major cities of Florida and direct flying routes of the big eastern airlines have their termini at Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa, with strong competition among them for the extension of their lines to other parts of the state. And at Miami, the Pan-American Airways maintains the largest seaplane terminus in the world, in and out of which ply the giant clippers which traverse the West Indies, Mexico and Central and South America.

Transportation to and from and around Florida is not limited to the railroads, the highways and the air. The development of Florida's harbor and waterway facilities since 1925 is one of the most amazing phases of the growth of the state. There were four seaports capable of accommodating and providing cargoes for large ocean-going freighters and passenger liners in 1926. Now there are ten. The splendid passenger ships of the coastwise lines out of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore now make Miami as well as Jacksonville, while the new Port Everglades, at Fort Lauderdale, has become a port of call for cruise trips of the Cunard, Canadian Pacific and German liners. Miami has replaced Key West as the northern terminus for passenger traffic to and from Havana, while the railroad freight ferry of the Florida East Coast Railroad now operates its car-floats from Port Everglades. Fort Pierce, on the Indian River, has become an active and busy seaport, primarily because of the needs of the citrus industry for low-rate refrigerated water carriage of oranges and grapefruit to the world markets. Port Everglades has its reason for being, not alone in a similar need of greater facilities for the shipment of the agricultural products of the lower Everglades and the Redlands district, but because the freight requirements of the nearby city of Miami cannot be fully served in its limited harbor space. The new seaport of West Palm Beach finds its cargoes, like Fort Pierce, in the enlarged and still growing output of Florida's farms and the industries founded upon them. Fernandina, Port St. Joe and Panama City, with their natural harbors, have long been ports of minor importance, now rising to first rank by reason of the new paper-making industries established in those towns. And the old seaport of Tampa is challenging Jacksonville for first rank in annual volume of tonnage.

For fifty years it has been the dream of yachtsmen whose tastes or means limit their navigation to land-locked or well sheltered waters to be able to take their craft from Boston to Florida and around Florida to New Orleans and up the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. That dream has just arrived so near the point of reality that except for the short stretch across New Jersey, from New Brunswick to Trenton, it is possible for the navigator of any craft drawing not more than six feet of water to take his vessel to and around Florida from any point on the Atlantic coast south of Boston or from any point on the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River, without once having to face the open sea or the Gulf of Mexico. The inland waterways which parallel the Atlantic coast from the lower Delaware River and enter Florida from Cumberland Sound have been completed by the dredging of channels and the establishment of navigation lights and channel markers all the way down Florida's East Coast, utilizing the natural sounds or salt rivers lying between the mainland and the offshore islands and keys. One can take his outboard-motored skiff, his cabin cruiser or his house-boat of whatever pretensions to Jacksonville, Daytona Beach or Miami by this route, or the navigator can turn westward at Stuart and go through the St. Lucie River and canal to Lake Okeechobee, cross the lake or skirt its southerly shore to Moore Haven and the Caloosahatchee River, leading to Charlotte Harbor and the keyguarded shore of the Gulf of Mexico, where behind the shelter of the keys he can voyage safely around the great arc of Florida's West Coast and so on to Mobile, Gulfport, New Orleans and the Mississippi.

More than four thousand craft passed into Florida and out again through the inland waterway in 1936, the last year for which figures are available as this is written. Pleasure boats, fishing craft and freight-carrying barges utilize the waterway. In the first month after the cross-state canal through Lake Okeechobee was opened more than five hundred vessels made the transit between the Atlantic and the Gulf.

Water transportation does, indeed, play a big part in the economic life of Florida. As this is written private capital is preparing to construct a ship canal forty miles long to con nect the inland city of Lakeland with Tampa Bay and so furnish water transportation for the output of the great phosphate mines of Polk County, which produce 80 percent of the world's supply of this essential element for agricultural fertilizers. Then there is the highly controversial cross-state Florida Ship Canal, hardly begun before work was stopped, a commercial and economic project which found itself unexpectedly entangled in the turmoil of national politics and whose future at this writing, late 1937, is still beclouded in a fog of doubt as to when its construction will be resumed and the canal completed, if not as to whether it will ever be done. The authors have attempted, elsewhere, to present the facts about the Florida Ship Canal in as detached a fashion as possible, with little hope that even the most cold-blooded and truthful analysis will be acceptable to the violent partisans on either side of the Great Florida Canal Controversy.

If and when the Canal is constructed it will add three more to Florida's list of seaports accessible to the largest ocean freighters, Palatka, Ocala and Dunellon.

Turning from the surface of the waters to their depths, one of the reasons why folk come to Florida and stay there, the sole reason why many make their annual pilgrimage, is the fishing. With 1,146 miles of coastline on the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, and innumerable sounds, bayous, inlets and salt water creeks, Florida has in recent years become the mecca for salt-water fishermen of all degrees, from the veriest tyro who ever dropped a line off a pier to the sporting enthusiasts with their hundred-dollar rods and reels, who find life's greatest thrill in landing the leaping tarpon or the acrobatic sailfish. Fish of the tropics and fish of the northern seas swarm in the waters off Florida's coasts in such profusion as cannot be matched elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. For the fisherman who prefers the calmer but still often exciting sport of fresh-water fishing, Florida's almost innumerable lakes and rivers are full of fish of many kinds, including what sportsmen generally are coming to regard as the king of fresh-water game fish, the big-mouthed black bass, with which the State Fish and Game Commission keeps the inland waters stocked. Bass from ten pounds upwards are so common in Florida's lakes that a six-pounder, such as would be something to brag about in the North, is dismissed as commonplace; many bass of fifteen pounds are recorded annually. Naturally, in a country so completely surrounded and covered by fish-haunted waters, the commercial fisheries of Florida rank, in the aggregate, among its chief industries. It is about a ten to one chance that the shrimp served in any northern hotel or restaurant or offered in cans at the grocery were caught somewhere off the Florida coast, almost anywhere from Fernandina to Pensacola, or canned in a Florida shrimp cannery. A very high proportion of the nation's consumption of Spanish mackerel, pompano, red snapper and other seafoods has been caught by Florida fishermen and shipped from Florida ports. Even the humble catfish of Lake Okeechobee finds its way to northern markets; many carload lots of Okeechobee cats are shipped to canneries in the Missouri Valley where they are, reputedly, dyed pink and offered to the unsuspecting consumers as a particularly choice brand of salmon! At least, that was the practice a few years ago and doubtless continues unless the Federal authorities have put an end to this particular form of misbranding.

As the waters of Florida teem with fish, so do its fields, forests and swamps teem with an abundance and variety of wild game. There is good hunting of some sort anywhere in Florida. From the omnipresent cotton-tail to the bears which have not yet been exterminated in the dense forests, the list of Florida game animals includes the not infrequent catamounts of the Big Cypress Swamp, and the elusive 'coon and wary 'possum in almost every part of the state. There is abundance of deer in the Everglades and in the National Forests of Florida.

Quail abound everywhere and pheasants are not uncommon. Most of Florida's abundant bird life, except the millions of wild ducks which visit its waters in the migration season, are rigidly protected by law, well-enforced against the rapacious pot-hunter. Most of Florida's bird-life is either too ornamental or too useful to be sacrificed. Just as a matter of correcting a common misapprehension, the flamingo is not a native Florida bird. Those pink and white feathered birds which the Florida visitor may have seen at the Hialeah race track are importations from the West Indies. Their cousins, the roseate spoonbill, inhabit Florida and are often mistaken for flamingoes. The giant frigate birds soaring and wheeling aloft with hardly a visible wing motion, over the waters of the Gulf, are believed to be heralds of the storm when they swing landward. The blue and white herons, the dozens of varieties of cranes and other long-legged water fowl, the ungainly pelican and the sleek diving cormorants, the numberless terns and gulls, sandpipers and other sea birds, are a part of the scenery with which Florida sets the stage for the entertainment of its winter guests. They are as much an essential part of the Florida scene as are the galloping porpoises in its harbors, the alligators in its lakes and bayous, or the occasional manatees or sea-cows in its rivers.

Driving across the Everglades along the Tamiami Trail or following the water-courses almost anywhere else in Florida the visitor may see occasional gators sunning themselves on the banks, ready to scramble into the water at the slightest alarm. Picturesquely vicious as the alligator looks, he has never been held a menace to human life. Pig raising is likely to prove unprofitable if the piggery is too close to a'gator-haunted pool, and it is not recommended to let toddling infants frolic on the banks of remote South Florida lakes and creeks unless there is a nurse or a policeman, or both, close by. The alligator is an arrant coward and will not attack anything which offers resistance. A fox-terrier or a tomcat can drive a ten-foot 'gator to cover.

Unlike the alligator, the rattlesnake stands its ground and, if annoyed, can be a deadly antagonist. Being a gentleman of royal reptilian blood, however, the rattlesnake always gives ample warning before he strikes and never pursues when one steps aside and gives him a wide berth. The tourist visitor to Florida who does not stray off the beaten tourist track need have no slightest apprehension of encounters with rattlesnakes. One can live in Florida for a lifetime and never see one, unless he goes of deliberate purpose into the secluded and remote regions where they nest. It is always open season for rattlesnakes in Florida, and commercial hunters thrive from the sale of rattlesnake skin to be tanned into ornamental leather for shoes, belts and handbags. One of Florida's curious industries is a cannery for putting up rattlesnake meat, which is white, tender and likened in taste to the breast of capon by those who have eaten it. The industry is still a one-man affair, but the market for snake meat is said to be growing among epicures. It is very vastly exceeded by the market for turtle steaks. Key West does an extensive business in catching and canning loggerhead turtles, which are caught in abundance in the Florida Straits, between Cuba and the mainland, where the warm waters of the Gulf pour into the Atlantic, forming the Gulf Stream whose current warms our own Atlantic Coast and swings across the ocean to mingle with the icy Greenland current and so give rise to the fogs which are the chief obstacle to the navigation of the North Atlantic by sea or air.

So far we have been sketching in rather broad strokes a rough outline of the purely physical aspects of Florida as nature made it and man has developed it. All derive more or less directly from the Florida climate, and in combination constitute the lure which draws people to Florida to play or to work, to visit or to stay.

What do folk do with themselves when they come to Florida, besides go fishing?

The principal thing that most tourists do is to loaf in the sun, usually with as few clothes on as the law permits; at any rate, to loaf. It would be an interesting calculation, which no statistician has undertaken so far, to figure out how many more swim-suits than swimmers there are on Florida's beaches at the height of the tourist season. It is a safe guess that more tourists take sunbaths than go in bathing. The fit of one's bathing suit has nothing to do with the wearer's ability to swim. As a matter of fact, most of the swimming done in Florida is done in tanks or pools, which are as often filled with fresh water as with salt. The attraction of Florida's beaches is their broad expanses of hard-packed fine white sand and the opportunity they afford to loll undressed out-of-doors in Winter as well as in Summer and absorb into one's system the healthgiving rays of the sun with the least physical exertion.

But one does not need to go into the water, or even to lie on the beach in a bathing suit to enjoy Florida's winter sunshine and that mystical something in the Florida air which relaxes tense nerves, lessens the pressure on hardening arteries and tired heart muscles, and fills the spirits of those who do nothing but sit around and soak in the climate with a sense of complete contentment and well-being. For those, however, who are not content to take their ease in utter idleness Florida offers to its winter guests opportunity to participate in a variety of sports and amusements which includes every form of entertainment ever devised, from the distinctly non-athletic checkers to polo, from Bible classes to burlesque.

It is hard to get out of sight of a golf course anywhere in Florida. The ancient pastime of pitching horse-shoes owes its current nation-wide popularity to its revival a few years ago by a group of elderly winter tourists in St. Petersburg. Few Florida cities which cater to the winter tourist trade are without their roque courts and their batteries of tennis and handball courts. The latest and most currently popular form of outdoor sport in Florida is shuffle-board. Until recently an amusement confined to the decks of ships, shuffle-board has become such an institution in Florida that in some communities the winter membership of shuffle-board clubs runs high into the thousands. Like skeet-shooting, motor-boating, or just sitting on a green bench in St. Petersburg's park and listening to a band concert, it keeps the participants out-of-doors where they can get the full benefit of Florida's climate, and that is what most of them have come to Florida for.

All sorts and conditions of men and women make up Florida's transient winter population. The casual newspaper reader who has gained his impressions of Florida from the headlines and the rotogravure sections is apt to think of Florida as inhabited in winter solely by snooty millionaires hibernating in their Palm Beach villas, show-girls and tinhorn sports crowding the beaches of Miami, horse-race devotees flocking to Hialeah and Tropical Park, and gamblers, bookmakers and thieves of all degrees trying to take their money away from them by fair means or foul.

That is only a slightly overdrawn picture of a widely-prevalent impression of Florida. It is not even faintly accurate. It reflects only the more spectacular activities of a highly limited area of Florida's lower East Coast. Even along the narrow strip of land lying between the Everglades and the Atlantic and stretching the seventy-five miles between Palm Beach and Miami the exaggerated picture conveyed by the headlines and the rotos represents only the extravagances of possibly one percent of the total number of the winter residents of that area. Their doings are reported because they are news, and news is the record of the unusual. Human nature does not change, even when it goes to Florida. Wonderful as the Florida climate is, it has not the power to alter the instincts, tastes and habits of those who come under its influence. It can only rejuvenate their bodies.

So Florida, that is to say public opinion as reflected in the state's attitude toward its guests, says in effect: "As long as you're in Florida make yourselves at home. Do what you like, follow your inclinations, let yourselves go. You came to Florida to relax; choose your own form of relaxation, and we will see that you have every facility for getting the most out of your Florida vacation. We only insist that you observe a reasonable degree of law and order within the restrictions of ordinary public decency."

Since birds of a feather tend to flock together, the socially prominent, the extravagant Johnny-come-latelies, the social climbers, the spendthrifts, the sportsmen and the sports and the parasites of varying degrees who are always found on the fringe of those classes, whenever they are at play, concentrate in Winter where others of their kind foregather, and their gay doings, sports and adventures make headlines and so present a picture of Florida which is true enough so far as it portrays the activities of a few thousand, but makes a decidedly lopsided picture of the life of more than two million other Florida visitors and of Florida's permanent residents.

Strikingly in contrast, and far more typical of the vast majority of Florida's winter resorts and winter visitors, is the picture presented by Florida's sixteen hundred churches every Sunday. To get a seat in the crowded pews of most of them one has to go early and stand in line. In some of the larger communities to which tourists flock, churches draw congregations which overflow out on the steps, where hundreds of the devout may be seen kneeling throughout the service. Many of the churches have two morning services on Sundays, some even a third especially for young people and children. These folk, who constitute or represent nine-tenths, at least, of Florida's winter guests, also do not change their characters with the climate. They are the ones upon whom the charm of Florida's skies exerts the most potent influence; it is from their ranks that Florida draws most of its new yearly crop of permanent residents; they and their kind, sober-minded, unspectacular, quiet, ordinary American people, afflicted with neither wealth nor poverty, plain middle-class people, average Americans of all ages, who are planting their new homes in Florida. They and their children are already on the way to becoming the dominant element in the life and public affairs of the state. Already, as has been pointed out, more than half of Florida's permanent residents came from elsewhere, and most of them came in just this way; first as tourists, then as tenants in town or country, then as home-owners and participants in the business, industrial and agricultural opportunities, which are not always visible to the tourist in his first season but the magnitude of which becomes apparent as he gets better acquainted with Florida.

One result, and a highly important one, of the rapid growth of Florida's fixed population since 1920, has been a tremendous increase in Florida's school capacity and a corresponding elevation of its standards of public education. It has literally been difficult for most Florida communities to build new school houses, both grade schools and high schools, fast enough to accommodate the rapidly growing number of children of school age, while the pressure upon the state's institutions of higher learning has been even greater. So excellent are the public schools of most Florida communities, so high the pedagogical standards to which their teaching staffs must measure up, that large numbers of families who do not yet regard themselves as Floridians, but who have formed the habit of Florida winter vacations, come down early enough to enroll their children at the beginning of the school year, and remain in Florida until the spring term is over in May. The University of Florida, headed by a former United States Commissioner of Education, has been obliged to tighten up its entrance requirements inorder not to be overcrowded. A similar condition obtains at the State College for Women. As a result of the demand for higher education several municipalities, notably Miami and Tampa, have established municipal universities, while such privately endowed institutions as Stetson University, Rollins College and scores of schools, of all grades from kindergarten to college preparatory, are gaining high rank and national fame, with students and pupils from every part of the United States. Several northern preparatory schools have adopted the plan of dividing the educational year into two parts, faculty and student body moving to Florida in November and carrying on school work under the state's balmy skies until they return North in April, thus spending the entire year in the out-of-doors.