Ivy Stranahan, Mother of Fort Lauderdale
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
If Frank Stranahan was the father of Fort Lauderdale, Ivy Stranahan was its mother, and she outlasted him by more than forty years. She was born Ivy Julia Cromartie in the little settlement of Lemon City, and in eighteen ninety-nine, at just eighteen years old, she was hired to be the first schoolteacher on the New River for about forty-eight dollars a month. The community built her a one-room schoolhouse, and she taught nine students.
Frank and Ivy came to know each other during the months she lived and taught at the settlement, and they married on the sixteenth of August, nineteen hundred, at her family home. From then on, Ivy poured herself into nearly every civic cause the young city produced. She helped found the women's club, worked for the vote, and became a lifelong advocate for the Seminole people, teaching in their camps and pressing for their education and land.
After Frank's death she stayed on in the house on the river until she died in nineteen seventy-one, at the age of ninety. She had watched Fort Lauderdale grow from a riverside trading post to a real city, and she had a hand in almost every part of that growth.
