Frank Stranahan and the New River Trading Post

The oldest surviving building in Broward County stands right here on the north bank of the New River, and the man who built it is called the father of Fort Lauderdale. Frank Stranahan arrived in January of eighteen ninety-three, at the age of twenty-seven, hired to run his cousin's ferry and overnight camp at Tarpon Bend on the river. He soon started trading on his own account, mostly with the Seminole people, and earned a reputation as a fair dealer.

In nineteen oh one he put up a two-story building on this spot. The ground floor was a trading post, and the upper floor served as a community hall, post office, courthouse, and gathering place for the tiny settlement growing around him. When the town needed a first schoolteacher, that need would bring him a wife.

But the story does not end well. The collapse of Florida's land boom in nineteen twenty-six, followed by devastating hurricanes, wiped out much of what Frank had built. Deeply depressed and in poor health, on the twenty-second of May, nineteen twenty-nine, Frank Stranahan tied himself to an iron grate and drowned in the New River in front of his own home.

The house survived him, and it survives still, a museum on the water he loved and the water that took him.