John Dolen

Oil magnate and railroad builder Henry Flagler couldn’t imagine a town at what would become Fort Lauderdale, but he reckoned it would make good farming land. We look at the…

Decades after Fort Lauderdale was incorporated, here’s how a parade of smaller towns surrounded us. Our most infamous adjoining hamlet featured just 14 mobile homes, an orange grove, some junkyards…

The origin of our city’s name is deeply rooted in history. Many enjoy diving into ancestry.com or other genealogical services to see where they come from, and to learn about…

Miami isn’t the only South Florida city with movie stardom. Earlier this year, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis announced a partnership to build a movie studio on the 60-acre site…

It was geographical love-at-first-sight when Melvin Anglin discovered Lauderdale-By-The-Sea. Around here, it’s not hard to discover historic tales about special enclaves within the Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area. Especially when they…

Through the adversity of centuries past, what drove the Tribe to achieve the prosperity it has today? In last month’s column, we noted a key moment in the growth of…

Much of what America had then, we didn’t. Then things started moving. One of the key epochs in our city’s early history occurred from 1915 to 1920. Before then: •…

During the height of segregation in Broward, there were just three Black high schools – and two exceptional principals. At the height of segregation in our region in the 1950s,…

Before the land boom in early Fort Lauderdale, it was all about the tomato. Yes, tomatoes were the stars amid a booming vegetable harvest, bushels by the hundreds of thousands.…

North Florida had plantations, but what did we have? With the topic of slavery in the news, you might wonder about its history in our city. There was not widespread…