Indian Haulover and Fort Lauderdale

This stretch of the Fort Lauderdale waterfront is older than the city by centuries. The Bahia Mar marina sits on a spot that Seminole and other native peoples are said to have used as a haulover, a place where canoeists lifted their boats overland to move between New River Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. It was a practical shortcut through a landscape threaded with waterways.

The Second Seminole War brought American soldiers here. In eighteen thirty-eight, the Army built a fort near this spot and named it for Major William Lauderdale of Tennessee, who had led his volunteers into the Everglades campaign against the Seminole. Lauderdale himself died of illness later that year and never saw the settlement that would grow up carrying his name. The fort was active for four years until the war wound down in eighteen forty-two, and the outpost was abandoned. The city that eventually grew here took its name from that temporary wartime installation.