Boca Raton: Tequesta Ground to Resort to Airfield to Suburb
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
For more than a thousand years, Tequesta people fished and hunted along these South Florida shores, paddling dugout canoes through lagoons and coastal hammock. By seventeen sixty-three, European disease had all but extinguished the tribe, and the last survivors departed for Cuba.
In the nineteen twenties, architect Addison Mizner envisioned the most lavish resort on earth here, a Mediterranean Revival city for America's wealthy elite. His Boca Raton Resort rose from the palmettos, though the nineteen twenty-six land bust ended his grander plans before they could be built.
In nineteen forty-two, the Army took nearly six thousand acres and erected eight hundred buildings almost overnight, training the nation's first radar operators in strict wartime secrecy. Bombers flew where herons had waded.
After the war, Florida Atlantic University opened on the old airfield in nineteen sixty-four, and Boca Raton grew into the manicured suburb it is today. Every layer of its past is still here if you know where to look.
