Lake Worth Beach: The Town Fannie James Built First

Before Lake Worth Beach was a city, before it was a town, before the Palm Beach Farms Company arrived with its platting maps and development schemes, a Black woman named Fannie James was already here.

Samuel and Fannie James settled in this area in eighteen eighty-five, making them the first known permanent settlers of what would become Lake Worth Beach. Fannie James operated the local post office, called the Jewell Post Office, from eighteen eighty-nine to nineteen oh three, serving the scattered residents of a community that did not yet have a name. She and her husband had come to a place that most people in Florida had not yet found, and they built something from nothing.

The development company arrived in nineteen twelve, buying sixty thousand acres and calling the new planned community Lucerne. When the post office notified them that another Florida town already held that name, they renamed it Lake Worth, after the coastal lagoon that runs along this stretch of the Atlantic coast. The town was officially incorporated on June fourteenth, nineteen thirteen.

What followed was one of the fastest population surges in Florida's history at that point. The population grew from thirty-eight residents in July of nineteen twelve to three hundred and eight just five months later. The Florida land boom of the nineteen twenties sent the numbers higher still.

The town built up fast, and it built small. Between nineteen thirteen and nineteen forty-nine, roughly a thousand modest cottages went up across the city. Nearly all of them are still standing, making Lake Worth Beach home to the largest collection of vernacular Florida cottage architecture in the state.

The city changed its name from Lake Worth to Lake Worth Beach in twenty nineteen, to reflect what most residents had always called it anyway. The lagoon is still here. The cottages are still here. And the story of Fannie James, who came before any of it, is only recently being fully told.