Coconut Grove's Bahamian Founders: The Black Miami That Predates Miami
Near Miami, Florida
Miami incorporated in eighteen ninety-six, which makes it one of the youngest major cities in the United States. The history usually starts there, with Henry Flagler's railroad arriving and the city springing into existence on a thin limestone peninsula that had been, just weeks before, an unpromising stretch of subtropical scrub. That is not quite right. Miami already had a community when it incorporated. It had had one for twenty-three years.
The oldest documented civilian settlement in what is now the Miami metropolitan area is not Miami. It is the Bahamian Black community established in the Coconut Grove neighborhood beginning in eighteen seventy-three. These were skilled workers, primarily from the Bahamas, who came to build the tourist infrastructure of early South Florida: Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel, the Deering family's Vizcaya estate, the homes and churches and early civic structures of a city that was still a generation away from existing on any map. They were carpenters, stonemasons, seamstresses, and domestic workers. They established churches, schools, and mutual aid societies in the decades before Miami incorporated. They had a community before the city had a name.
When Miami did incorporate in eighteen ninety-six, its Black founders were systematically excluded from civic power. The city's political structures, its zoning laws, its business licensing, and eventually its restrictive covenants were organized around keeping Black residents in particular neighborhoods and out of particular opportunities. The Coconut Grove community that had built the first Miami was gradually pushed out of it through the combined pressures of restrictive covenants, urban renewal, and development that valued the land they lived on more than the community living on it.
The churches they built survive. The E.W.F. Stirrup House, built by Bahamian carpenter Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup in eighteen ninety-seven, is the oldest surviving Black-owned property in Miami. The community that built it was the first Miami. That fact is not in the welcome sign.
