Category Archives: Landmarks

What treasures are in your house?

Do you have photo albums stored on the top shelf of your closet, buried deep in the attic or stowed some other place in your house?  What about that file box of old school awards and birthday cards or the shoebox full of postcards?

The items are probably mementos from your childhood, and likely illustrate people and places lost to time. Perhaps you inherited these items from a relative and you don’t know much about the people and places in the photographs.

House (just north of the Boynton Inlet) built in 1982 and torn down in 2000.

Please do not throw them away.  Each scrap of paper, image, postcard, receipt and letterhead contains a link to the past. You never know how such information might reveal clues  to our history or provide valuable information to researchers and future generations.

Looking west from Manalapan to Hypoluxo Island. Circa 1912-1917.

Case in point: I recently came across a 100-year-old photo album on the Internet. The album contained hundreds of images of coastal Palm Beach County prior to development.  Following clues discovered in the old album, I researched and uncovered the locations of the images and learned about the earliest families to live in the area we call Manalapan; the tropical paradise just north of the Boynton Inlet.

Image of our beach, circa 1912-1917, discovered in a discarded photo album full of coastal Palm Beach County photographs.

To learn  more about my “paradise found” in the August issue of The Coastal Star newspaper- click here to read it.

Next time you think about those dusty old photo albums stashed somewhere in your house, consider adding to the historical record by chronicling your family history. If you can’t remember who the people are, or where the images were taken, the historical researchers at the Boynton Beach Historical Society (and our members) might be able to figure it out. We refer you to the appropriate local or national repository.

Manalapan, Florida. circa 1914.

Remember, please don’t throw our history away!

I guess there has to be a last of everything, and in Boynton’s proud dairy history, these are indeed the last. The last cows of Boynton are in their 12 acre pasture, tucked between a gas station, a development, and Knuth Road. You may have driven past them on Boynton Beach Boulevard. I often take children there to feed the cows carrots, so they can see what

Cow in the Winchester Pasture

a real cow looks like. One evening we were lucky enough to meet Mrs. Winchester, who came by to check on them. There was a nostalgic gaze on her face as she told me of the days when thousands of cows grazed across Boynton’s prairies. She laughed as she told me her first name – Elsie! A perfect name for a dairyman’s wife.

These last cows hold the secret of all those that came before them. Boynton’s flat drained sandy and muck soils were ideal for cattle grazing, and in the 1920s,  the Model Land Company encouraged people to enter the dairying business.  The first large-scale dairy had some very lucky cows, who enjoyed an ocean view. In 1920, Ward Miller decided that the lands that today make up Briny Breezes would make a fine dairy. Being near the ocean, diseases brought by ticks would be less of a problem. In 1923, he built the Shore Acres Dairy, along with owning the Miller-Jordan Dairy on Federal Highway, while W.S. Shepard had the Royal Palm Dairy.

Another large dairy in the early days of Boynton dairying was Bertana Farms, owned by A.E Parker and on the Dixie Highway. He was also part owner of the Alfar Creamery in West Palm Beach, and a former city manager of West Palm Beach; much of the milk from Boynton was processed through the Alfar Creamery. Harry Benson and E.L. Winchester also had their dairys on the eastern side of Boynton.

As land along the ocean and the Dixie highway became more valuable, dairies began to pop up along the Military Trail, Lawrence Road and what would eventually become Congress Avenue (Congress was not put through Boynton until 1965). One of earliest and most famous dairy families of Boynton were the Weavers. Their dairy was located along the Military Trail, where the Cypress Creek Golf Club is today. M.A. Weaver served as mayor of Boynton for many years, and their house still stands in Lake Boynton Estates. His sons had land north and south of Boynton Beach Boulevard on Military Trail, all of which was eventually sold for developments and shopping. Stanley Weaver was also very much involved in Boynton, serving as mayor in the 1950s and serving longer than anyone else ever has on the Lake Worth Drainage District Board. The Boynton Canal is now named in his honor.
Next installment – The Last Cows of Boynton – Part 2