Word: palmettos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Beyond the long curves of palmetto and Australian pine, huge billboards promise Treasure Coast, Orlando, Cape Canaveral, St. Augustine. But on I-95 there is no sign of habitation. Even the armadillos are dead. The highway flies over Jacksonville and descends in the low salt marshes of Georgia. Savannah, by some gracious concession of the engineers, is only 14 miles away, a snoozing 19th century time capsule. At Mrs. Wilkes' famous boardinghouse, breakfast is served on 13 platters, and a man at the table says he works on the railroad...
...favorite winter playground. Hmmm, let's see now. Here is a picture of palm trees swaying gently under a cottony blue sky while a family frolics in the foamy surf. Here is a snowy white heron flitting along a river of sea grass in the Everglades, the mangrove and palmetto serene as a Sunday morning. There is a creamy stucco Palm Beach mansion, its red tile roof glinting fiercely in the sun and bougainvillea rioting, colorfully in the yard. And, of course, a couple of sunburned senior citizens of Miami Beach, he in a Hawaiian shirt and she in purple...
...those a bit more elevated was a young Cleveland widow by the name of Julia Tuttle, who moved to Miami in the 1870s. The city then was a makeshift village of shacks and sand trails hacked out of palmetto groves. When a freeze destroyed the citrus crop of central Florida in 1894, Tuttle picked a bouquet of orange blossoms untouched by the frost and sent it to Financier Henry Flagler as proof that South Florida was worth a look. Flagler, who was already building up St. Augustine, came, saw and was conquered; he built a railway to Miami and beyond...
...lead the attack. Perhaps he was rash. Perhaps his commanders regarded his troops as fodder, expendable. Intelligence reports claimed that Shaw's 600 men outnumbered the defenders 2 to 1. Exactly the reverse was true. Even after a heavy Union bombardment, Confederate soldiers remained strongly entrenched behind their palmetto barriers. As darkness fell on July 18, 1863, Shaw spoke quietly to his troops: "I want you to prove yourselves. The eyes of thousands will look on what you do tonight...