History of Palm Beach County, Florida
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Palm Beach County is a county in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Florida. Its history dates back to about 12,000 years ago, shortly after when Native Americans migrated into Florida. Juan Ponce de León became the first European in the area, landing at the Jupiter Inlet in 1513. Diseases from Europe, enslavement, and warfare significantly diminished the indigenous population of Florida over the next few centuries. During the Second Seminole War, the Battles of the Loxahatchee occurred west of modern-day Jupiter in 1838. The Jupiter Lighthouse, the county's oldest surviving structure, was completed in 1860. The first homestead claims were filed around Lake Worth in 1873. The county's first hotel, schoolhouse, and railway, the Celestial Railroad, began operating in the 1880s, while the first settlers of modern-day Lake Worth Beach arrived in 1885. During the 1890s, Henry Flagler and his workers constructed the Royal Poinciana Hotel and The Breakers in Palm Beach and extended the Florida East Coast Railway southward to the area. They also developed a separate city for hotel workers, which in 1894 became West Palm Beach, the county's oldest incorporated municipality. Major Nathan Boynton, Congressman William S. Linton, and railroad surveyor Thomas Rickards also arrived in the 1890s and developed communities that became Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, and Boca Raton, respectively.
The Florida Legislature established Palm Beach County, effective on July 1, 1909, splitting it from Dade County. The dredging of canals from the coast to Lake Okeechobee in the 1910s for the purpose of agricultural shipments led to the beginning of settlements around Lake Okeechobee. From then through the mid-1920s, the county experienced rapid population growth and a significant increase in land values, especially during the land boom. Many of the county's historic buildings and districts were constructed in the 1910s and 1920s; architect Addison Mizner alone designed 104 structures. However, the rapid growth and prosperity ended with the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane and the start of the Great Depression. The hurricane devastated the county and resulted in at least 2,500 deaths. Hundreds of thousands of men and women arrived in Palm Beach County during World War II for training and supporting the war effort, while several coastal towns were placed under blackout conditions due to the presence of German U-boats just offshore.
Many personnel who trained in Palm Beach County during the war later vacationed or relocated to the area. Consequently, a post-war boom ensued, with 19 new municipalities incorporated between 1947 and 1963, while over 100,000 people lived in the county by 1950. During the civil rights movement, schools in the county slowly desegregated despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and were not officially integrated until 1973. Rapid population growth occurred in the western suburban communities in the 1980s, though the larger eastern cities experienced urban blight by then. This led to downtown revitalization efforts, most notably with the opening of Mizner Park in 1991 and CityPlace in 2000. The close results of that year's presidential election in Florida and Palm Beach County's "butterfly ballot" led to a recount and controversial decision by the United States Supreme Court. In 2004 and 2005, hurricanes Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma caused significant damage in the county. Although population growth has slowed somewhat in recent decades, the 2020 census reported that nearly 1.5 million people are year-round residents of Palm Beach County.