Julia Tuttle, the Mother of Miami
Near Miami, Florida
When the Great Freeze of eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety five killed the citrus groves across northern and central Florida, a widow named Julia Tuttle saw her chance. Tuttle had moved south in eighteen ninety one, buying roughly six hundred and forty acres on the north bank of the Miami River, where a wilderness of pine and palmetto met Biscayne Bay. She believed a great city could rise here, and she had spent years trying to convince the railroad magnate Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway down to her lonely frontier.
He had refused. Then the freeze changed everything. Legend says that Tuttle mailed Flagler a sprig of fresh orange blossoms to prove that the frost had never reached Biscayne Bay, and that the flowers alone convinced him to build south.
It is a lovely story, and it may not be true. As early as nineteen thirteen a local booklet called the tale romantic but completely untrue, and historians note that it was Flagler's own agents who traveled down and carried back green citrus branches as living proof. What is certain is that Tuttle made Flagler an extraordinary offer.
She gave him free land for his hotel and his rail yards, along with half of her remaining property divided into alternating parcels. He accepted. The railroad reached the settlement on April fifteenth, eighteen ninety six.
Just over three months later, on July twenty eighth, the residents voted to incorporate the City of Miami. The vote was cast by three hundred and forty four men. More than one hundred and sixty of them were Black, many of them laborers who had cleared the land and laid the tracks, and without their votes the young community could not have met the legal threshold to become a city.
Julia Tuttle, the woman whose vision had made it all possible, could not vote at all. American women would not win that right for another twenty four years. She is remembered as the Mother of Miami, and she remains the only woman credited with founding a major American city.
She did not live to see her dream mature. Tuttle died in eighteen ninety eight, only two years after incorporation, at the age of forty nine.
