Hugh Taylor Birch and His Gift of Green
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Along the beach, wedged between the ocean and the high rise hotels, sits a wild green refuge of maritime hammock and gnarled sea grape, an oasis that exists only because one man refused to sell. In eighteen ninety three, a Chicago attorney named Hugh Taylor Birch came to South Florida looking for solitude and settled near the little village of Fort Lauderdale. He bought oceanfront land for about one dollar an acre, a price that seems impossible now, and over the years he assembled a stretch of beachfront roughly three and a half miles long.
In nineteen forty, he built himself an Art Deco home and named his estate Terramar, meaning land to the sea. As development crept closer and closer, Birch decided his paradise should outlive him. He deeded roughly one hundred eighty acres to the State of Florida in the early nineteen forties.
His single condition was that the land be kept in its natural, pristine state. Because of that gift, Hugh Taylor Birch State Park survives today, a corridor of untouched coastal wilderness in the middle of one of Florida's most heavily built beach cities.
