A Sketch of the History of Key West, Florida

A Sketch of the History of Key West, Florida A Sketch of the History of Key West, Florida Walter C. Maloney LibraryPress@UF Gainesville, Florida Cover: Map of the West Indies, published in Philadelphia, 1806. From the Caribbean Maps collection in the University of Florida Digital Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries. Reissued 2017 by LibraryPress@UF on behalf of the University of Florida This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. You are free to electronically copy, dis- tribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. Please contact the University Press of Florida (http://upress.ufl.edu) to purchase print editions of the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribu- tion, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. ISBN 978-1-947372-15-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-947372-17-7 (ePub) LibraryPress@UF is an imprint of the University of Florida Press. University of Florida Press 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://upress.ufl.edu The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series In 2016, the University Press of Florida, in collaboration with the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mel- lon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program, to repub- lish books related to Florida and the Caribbean and to make them freely available through an open access platform. The resulting list of books is the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series published by the Li- braryPress@UF in collaboration with the University of Florida Press, an imprint of the University Press of Florida. A panel of distinguished scholars has selected the series titles from the UPF list, identified as essential reading for scholars and students. The series is composed of titles that showcase a long, distinguished history of publishing works of Latin American and Caribbean scholarship that connect through generations and places. The breadth and depth of the list demonstrates Florida’s commitment to transnational history and regional studies. Selected reprints include Daniel Brinton’s A Guide- Book of Florida and the South (1869), Cornelis Goslinga’s The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (1972), and Nelson Blake’s Land into Water—Water into Land (1980). Also of note are titles from the Bicentennial Floridiana Facsimile Series. The series, published in 1976 in commemoration of America’s bicentenary, comprises twenty-five books regarded as “classics,” out-of-print works that needed to be in more libraries and readers’ bookcases, including Sidney Lanier’s Florida: Its Scen- ery, Climate, and History (1875) and Silvia Sunshine’s Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes (1880). Today’s readers will benefit from having free and open access to these works, as they provide unique perspectives on the historical scholarship on Florida and the Caribbean and serve as a foundation upon which today’s researchers can build. Visit LibraryPress@UF and the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress . Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series Project Members Library Press@UF Judith C. Russell Laurie N. Taylor Brian W. Keith Chelsea Dinsmore Haven Hawley Editorial Advisory Board Gary R. Mormino David C. Colburn Patrick J. Reakes University of Florida Press Meredith M. Babb Linda Bathgate Michele Fiyak-Burkley Romi Gutierrez Larry Leshan Anja Jimenez Marisol Amador Valerie Melina Jane Pollack Danny Duffy Nichole Manosh Erika Stevens This book is reissued as part of the Humanities Open Books program, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. EDITORIAL PREFACE. ••*•• Beginning with Fisher Island just south of Miami Beach a chain of islands, or keys, extends south, southwest, and west for approximately 225 miles to form an arc around the tip of the Florida peninsula. From Key Largo to Key West the islands are relatively large and close together. Beyond Key West the islands are small and almost forty-five miles of water lies be tween the Marquesas Keys and the Dry Tortugas. Although the keys were discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513, Spanish colonists passed them by to settle at more attractive mainland places. In 1822, the year after the United States acquired Florida, the navy used the wide, deep, natural harbor at Key West as a base in stamping out the pirates of the Caribbean. Two years later Monroe County was created with its county seat at Key West. For decades the salvaging of wrecked ships and the military establishment gave the island community its economic life. Immigrants from the Bahama Islands and Cuba arrived to earn their living by fishing in the waters surround ing the island or by rolling cigars in the newly established to bacco factories. By 1860 Key West was the second largest city in Florida with only 44 fewer residents than the 2,876 of Pen- sacola. During the Civil War the military forces at Key West pre vented the city from becoming Confederate territory. Former United States Senator Stephen Russell Mallory, Secretary of the Confederate Navy, grew up in Key West, and William Mar vin, who was appointed governor of the state after the war, was a resident of the city. Protected by the military, the strategically located Key West grew strong during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. For a third of a century it was Florida's largest city. By 1890 its 18,080 inhabitants out- IV numbered those of Pensacola by more than 6,000 and were al most 1,000 more than the residents of fast-growing Jackson ville. But in the 1890's Jacksonville went ahead of Key West, and during the twentieth century the island city suffered both absolute and relative decline. Located on an island three and a half miles long and a mile wide, Key West has an unusual history. Only ninety miles north of Havana, Cuba, it became a second home and a base of operations for patriotic Cubans who demanded independence from Spain. After 1900 and until the late 1950's it was the principal haven for Cubans who sought to regain power or to overthrow the existing regime in Cuba. Even in the 1960's, when the majority of Cuban refugees found new homes in Mi ami (by then Florida's largest city), Key West was the base for much activity against the Communist regime of Castro. For many decades the only drinking water for Key West resi dents came from rainfall stored in cisterns, and the only trans portation to and from the city was by boat. In 1912 Flagler's East Coast Railroad connected Key West to the mainland of Florida, but the hurricane of 1935 destroyed the railway. To day the Overseas Highway, airplanes, and ships provide access to the resort city, which before the admission of Hawaii into the Union was the southernmost city in the United States. Despite its historical significance, Key West has interested few lay or professional historians. Much of the city's written history is based on a speech given by Walter Cathcart Maloney in 1876 and later published as a pamphlet. Jefferson B. Browne relied on this source in producing his Key West, the Old and New in 1912. Scholars and writers of the Works Projects Administration project collected materials and wrote a guide to Key West in the 1930's, but as yet a complete his tory of Florida's unique city has not been written. Thelma Peters, Chairman of the Social Science Division of Miami-Dade Junior College, is a novelist and a historian. Her dissertation at the University of Florida traced the movements of British subjects who left East Florida in 1784 to settle in the Bahama Islands. Many of these Loyalists and their de scendants later established homes in the Florida Keys. She writes with the authority of a scholar in her biographical sketch of Maloney and the evaluation of his pioneer history. V The University of Florida Press acknowledges its indebted ness to Mrs. Margaret Knox Goggin, head of the University of Florida Libraries, and to Elizabeth Alexander, librarian of the P. K. Yonge Memorial Library of Florida History, for the use of a copy of Maloney's book to produce this facsimile. Dr. Peters was given aid by the staff of the Otto G. Richter Li brary, University of Miami, in the research for her introduc tion. REMBERT W. PATRICK GENERAL EDITOR of the FLORIDIANA SERIES INTRODUCTION. Had it not been for a fortuitous chain of events which hap pened on a clear hot Fourth of July, the only history of Key West written in the nineteenth century might never have got ten into print. The year was 1876 and an entire nation had paused to commemorate a significant milestone in its history— the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence. In that year Key West was Florida's largest city. In its re lation to the peninsula it was—and is—like the dot at the base of an exclamation point: of Florida, but at the same time de tached and unique.

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