From time to time, fresh information about our history turns up, and I can flesh out topics I have dealt with in some fashion in the ten years I have been writing this column.
Recently a reader provided us with a copy of a 1924 newspaper article headlined “A Chapter from the Life of Lauderdale’s Pioneer.”
The pioneer it speaks of is Frank Stranahan, and the story is the first I’ve seen based on an actual interview with Stranahan, who came here at the age of 27 in 1893. There were supposedly three other white settlers then, but they were spread over a 40-mile radius. Earlier settlers, many part of the fabled William Cooley settlement, fled immediately after an 1836 massacre by the Seminoles. Major William Lauderdale and his troops departed a year later. The city’s namesake died near Naples in 1838, 55 years before Stranahan arrived.
Most locals know that the Stranahan home, where he conducted business at the first post office and first trading post, still stands on the New River and is now a museum.
We’ve covered the pioneering life of Stranahan, his civic place in the growing city and his marriage to Ivy Cromartie, who became a great friend to the Seminoles who visited the trading post. She even started a school – but never sought to change Seminole traditions. We know of Frank’s growing real estate purchases, and we’ve recently covered the great farming boom starring lush tomatoes, the ketchup factory, the fabulous fishing and so much else as the town exploded in growth after Henry Flagler built a railroad stop at the fledgling settlement.
In the 1924 interview in the Fort Lauderdale Herald, Stranahan talked about the plentiful game in the original ecology of New River Settlement: “I’ve seen the time when I could step over to the hammock and kill a wild turkey as easy as we go into the backyard and kill a chicken now.”
But, surprisingly, he also traded in alligators.
“I recall one time when I bought 5,000 alligator eggs at five cents per egg,” said Stranahan. “The Indians brought in the nests, and I hatched them right here on these grounds.”
Stranahan and the Seminoles had a synergy. “I’ve often laughed to myself at the comment on the veranda of this house as having been built to conform with the old Southern style,” he said. “The truth is I put [it] here for the Indians to sleep on when they would come in from their hunts, tired out and needing a place to rest off the ground.
“And there were many nights when these floors were so crowded with sleeping Indians that you could hardly step between them.” While they slept, the dugout canoes they came in on bobbed nearby.
So, about those alligator nests. The article didn’t get into that, but a little research yielded answers.
Apparently alligators could bring in big profits back then, as their skin was used in boots, shoes, saddles, belts and handbags. And like today, we know alligators were plentiful here because they primarily dwell in slow-moving creeks and rivers, and swampy or brackish waters. The trade thrived all the way to Louisiana and beyond.
The Seminoles, like other Native American tribes, are said to have seen alligators as sacred creatures, even believing they could communicate with the spiritual world and act as “guardians of the natural order.” Their meat and hides were to be taken with due reverence for their part in that natural scheme, not for hunting as sport.
Be that as it may, the gator trade expanded so much that, like the trade in wild bird plumage that plundered our exotic bird population, the alligator was fast disappearing. It took federal laws later in the 20th century to prevent the gators’ complete extinction. A creature that had thrived for thousands of years in our region, and perhaps many more, became an endangered species.
We don’t know how long Stranahan was in that trade or how extensive it was for him, but it sheds a light on this little-known chapter of our early economy and culture.
We can ponder that when we go on that airboat ride or see reports of gators appearing in our suburban swimming pools. Or at our front doors.
But, as someone said long before me, “They were here first.”
Contributing writer: Walter Matthews
