Yes, tomatoes were the stars amid a booming vegetable harvest, bushels by the hundreds of thousands.
“The territory around Fort Lauderdale has the world beaten when it comes to growing fine tomatoes,” Miami Metropolis reported in 1905.
Farmers also grew potatoes, cabbage, beans and more, all in the rich soil of the high ground between the coastal marshes and the Everglades.
“By 1912, Fort Lauderdale had become one of the largest vegetable shipping centers in the United States,” wrote historian Stuart B. McIver. “Docks and packing houses were built along the river to handle the heavy barge traffic.”
Crops came not only from local farms but towns like Davie, Pompano, Deerfield, Dania and Hallandale. One count had over 4,300 acres of tomato crops growing in the area.
A waterway built to connect the North New River to Lake Okeechobee also brought a brisk shipping trade here from lake communities. Crops were transported down in steamboats to be shipped to the north.
(Those trips also carried passengers, among them Thomas Edison, a guest on the 70-foot sternwheeler Suwanee. One writer described the scenery along the way: “Sugar cane was three times as high as a person, and the vegetables and flowers were gorgeous.”)
Still wondering about the tomato’s early dominance? One of our earliest factories produced a very familiar condiment. It was none other than ketchup, or catsup if you prefer — and you know its main ingredient.
According to a 1918 Miami News report, the Ohio-based condiment company Harbauer came to Fort Lauderdale and set up in unused lumber warehouses.
“A shipment of 17 [rail] cars of machinery is being received and placed in position as rapidly as possible in buildings to be devoted to the manufacture of catsup. A large force of men will be required to operate a plant of this magnitude, which also involves the labor of hundreds of growers, pickers and handlers.”
If tomatoes and vegetables led the way in the shipping market, right behind was the fishing industry. Catfish hauls came down from Lake Okeechobee, also by boat, for shipment north. That led to fish houses springing up along the New River, with workers packing the fish in ice for the journey.
The sprawling fish houses along the waterfront began eliciting unwanted attention after a time. Their smells, sanitary conditions and ramshackle appearance eventually led to lawsuits.
Not that the fish houses were alone in less-than-Las-Olas-Boulevard appearance. Other than Frank Stranahan’s home and trading post and the New River Inn, many houses, according to history writer Jane Feehan, “were constructed with thick red paper nailed to framing.”
Within a few years, Harbauer’s ketchup factory, which processed the unwanted, overripe or damaged tomatoes, had company. In 1918, V. Taormina Co. of New Orleans set up a ketchup factory in Dania. (That company later merged with another to create the famous Progresso label in 1927.)
Where did all the farmers come from? Some were laborers on Henry Flagler’s railroad who stayed after its completion. Others came down from Georgia or over from the Bahamas seeking greener pastures. Later, bigger concerns from places like Ohio and Illinois foresaw the market and secured land for farming.
One early black settler explained the attraction for the pioneer farmers, according to an account in the Sun Sentinel.
“This was a great farming place, and we were in the farming business, raising tomatoes,” said Isadore Mizell, whose family came here in 1910. “There were a lot of black people who would come down [from North Florida and Georgia] during the farm season and help raise crops… Some grew cabbage and some peppers… Now nobody owned [anything] when we came down here. We went anywhere we wanted to. We would just go out and clean up a place and plant tomatoes… People never said anything about it.”
Clear out some palmetto, or some pine and scrub brush, and plant. The tomatoes and ketchup just followed.
