South Venice:
More Recent History
Florida Board of Internal ImprovementsTHE LAND THAT COMPRISES South Venice once belonged to Spain. After Spain ceded Florida to the United States, the land belonged to the United States government. Congress passed the “Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act of 1850” which conveyed the whole of Florida’s swamp and overflowed lands to State ownership. A stipulation in the act was that the sale of the lands to private interests should finance the necessary work of reclamation. To plan for the development of this huge area, a Board of Internal Improvements was created in 1851 by the State Legislature.
The area that would eventually be called South Venice thus came to belong to the Florida Board of Internal Improvements.
Little progress was made in the way of internal improvements for the next thirty years. Transportation was in poor shape in the state. Several extensions of the railroads were completed during the Civil War and Florida became one of the main sources of supply for the South, but the railroads were destroyed by both sides during the war. During reconstruction, the Internal Improvement Fund became so entangled in debt and politics that it was unable to accomplish anything constructive. The Trustees tried to get the Fund out of debt by increasing land sales. Before many deals could be made, creditors forced the District Court of North Florida to put the Fund in the hands of a receiver.
By 1877 Florida possessed an Internal Improvement Fund in receivership, several millions in worthless bonds, and high taxes. Trustees continued to sell parcels of land through the receivership and the monies were used to settle claims and judgments against the Fund. But the ordinary sales of land were not enough to keep the debt from increasing and the Fund was being depleted by compound interest and the expense of litigation.
Hamilton Disston
SAMUEL A. SWANN, AN AGENT OF THE TRUSTEES, was authorized to negotiate the sale of three million acres at not less than thirty cents an acre. He spent from 1877 to 1881 with northern capitalists and English financiers looking for an immediate buyer of a large tract to save the Fund from disaster. Then, in 1881, the Trustees found Hamilton Disston, a Philadelphian who had inherited his father’s saw works a few years earlier. Florida’s governor persuaded the Philadelphia toolmaker and developer to purchase four million acres of South Florida for development. He paid twenty five cents an acre. The one million dollars the state received from the purchase freed the Internal Improvement Fund of debt and opened the way for development of much of peninsular Florida.
The four million acres purchased by Hamilton Disston included the area now known as South Venice, including the lots where my aunt and uncle would in 1973 build their new home.
Hamilton Disston was one of several entrepreneurs, including Henry Flagler and Henry Plant, that led Florida’s development. They spearheaded an an era of rapid economic growth. Great deposits of phosphate were discovered, citrus groves were planted, southern swampland was drained and converted to farmland, and railroads and tourist facilities were constructed.
Disston’s first project was to give Lake Okeechobee an outlet to the Gulf through the Caloosahatchee River. Work began at Lake Flirt in January 1882 and within a year the lake’s waters began to flow to the Gulf through the cut and Okeechobee’s level dropped considerably.
A second operation began in the upper Kissimmee valley in July 1882 with the cutting of the Southport Canal between Lake Tohopekaliga and Lake Cypress. Finishing the cut, the dredge turned to connecting Lake Tohopekaliga with East Lake Tohopekaliga. This canal, called the St. Cloud Canal, was begun in January 1883, and completed in September 1884. By the fall of 1883, the company had opened navigation from the Gulf to the town of Kissimmee.
A tract of land on the Southport Canal which had previously been under three feet of water was used for sugar cane in February 1884 and harvested later with much success. Disston opened a sugar plantation in January 1886 just east of the St. Cloud Canal on East Lake Tohopekaliga.
Hamilton Disston developed Tarpon Springs and then was lured to St. Petersburg. Disston had great plans for the southern tip of the Pinellas peninsula. He built Disston City on Boca Ciega Bay and had the Waldorf Hotel built on its shores. A wharf extended into the bay where the steamboat Mary Disston carried freight and passengers to and from Tampa and Cedar Key. Guests at Disston’s Waldorf Hotel in 1886 could not sleep at night for the noise of fish jumping on the flats.
After Disston’s death in 1896, his empire in Florida quickly crumbled. Disston’s drainage project did not accomplish all that was expected and in some cases led to over drainage. But it was the first large scale project in the central and southern Florida area and a major part of it is still functioning today.
Development of South Venice
THE LOTS WHERE MY AUNT AND UNCLE BUILT would be sold off by Disston and his company to several successive owners, including the Palmer family, Eastern Fertilizer Comapny, and the Old Colony Trust Company. A development company partially owned by Clayton C. Townes, who was the mayor of Cleveland from 1924 to 1925 and who died in Florida in 1970, would buy the lots from the Tamiami Investment Company in 1925. Before that, the lands would belong to the Manasota Land and Timber Comapny, which would sell the property to the Woodmere Lumber Company in 1922. Woodmere Lumber took over operation of a lumber mill that was built in 1918. The grounds surrounding the mill would include 1,500 homes, a church, a commissary, machine shops, and a railroad yard. The company’s property, which they used for sawmilling and terpentine operations, extended from the Gulf of Mexico all the way over to the Myakka River. Fire eventually destroyed the sawmill, and the property was abandoned in 1930.
The Caspersen family would own part of the property. Caspersen Beach and county park are named after this family. The Caspersens would sell part of the lots in 1941 and 1944 to the Venice Estates Realty Company and parts of the lots would be sold to the W. & A. Construction Company in 1952. This would be the company that actually developed South Venice. The Venice Area Chamber of Commerce entered into a non-profit trust agreement that same year to administer the sale of the lots in the newly developing South Venice subdivision. The Venice Chamber of Commerce conveyed the parks to the South Venice Civic Association in 1957.
The lots upon which my aunt and uncle would build were sold by the Chamber of Commerce in 1956 to one Alan Douglas Roach, who held the property for a month before reselling it. The owners, Mary and John Glynn, would own the property until John died on April 15, 1972. Mary sold the property to Lester and Naomi Davis in August 1972, who in turn sold it one month later to Jesse and Annie Collins. My aunt and uncle bought their lots from them in 1973 through a broker. They never met the previous owners.
My uncle died in 1982. My aunt remarried a few years later and in 1986 sold the lots and the house she and my uncle had built there to my parents. My father died in 1990. My mother still owns the property.