Boynton Beach: The Major's Mile of Oceanfront

In eighteen ninety-four, Major Nathan Smith Boynton, a Civil War veteran from Port Huron, Michigan, sailed down the Lake Worth coast and bought four hundred acres on the spot, including a full mile of oceanfront. He built the wooden Boynton Beach Hotel two years later to attract winter tourists from the north. The project drew carpenters and truck farmers to what had been empty scrub.

The town was officially registered in eighteen ninety-eight by Byrd Spilman Dewey and her husband Fred. It incorporated as a town in nineteen twenty and spent the following decades growing quietly until the postwar Florida boom transformed it into one of the largest cities in Palm Beach County, now home to more than eighty thousand residents. The major never saw that transformation.

He died in nineteen eleven, but the name he put on the map stuck.