Coral Springs: Tequesta Shore to Drained Farmland to Instant City
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
For more than a thousand years, Native peoples, including the Tequesta, lived around the edge of the Everglades, fishing the shallow marshes and moving through a landscape ruled by sawgrass and water. The last Tequesta left for Cuba in seventeen sixty-three, nearly two centuries before anyone thought to build a suburb where they had camped.
The land sat as open Everglades well into the twentieth century. Then engineers drained it, scraped it flat, and turned it into cattle pasture and vegetable fields.
In nineteen sixty-three, Fort Lauderdale builders James Hunt and Joe Taravella of Coral Ridge Properties incorporated Coral Springs with a specific promise: planned for schools and parks alongside the streets. Strict rules on landscaping and signs shaped the look of every neighborhood. They called it a city planned from the ground up.
Today it is home to more than one hundred thirty thousand people. The Everglades edge that once pressed against this ground now lies a few miles west, diminished but not gone.
