Dade County was huge in the Pioneer Era. It covered four of today's counties: Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.
It’s amazing, then, that its entire non-native population was only 257 in 1880, and those few people were largely clustered near Stuart at the northern edge of the county.
Why was Dade so sparsely inhabited?
"A Paradise," the first visitors said, when visiting our region. However, it was very isolated.
- East Coast railroad lines only went as far south as Titusville.
- The Jupiter and Palm Beach Inlets were very shallow, when they were open at all.
- Paddlewheel steamboats could only travel down the sheltered Indian River Lagoon as far as the Jupiter Lighthouse. Even then, a trip took 23 hours.
Courtesy UFDC
It was tough reaching Lake Worth from Jupiter. Unless you risked the surf with a shallow-draft sailboat like a "sharpie," your only options were to walk down the beach; struggle through scrubland; or wade through a sawgrass marsh.
A rickety hackney carriage and ox-drawn freight service ran through the scrub from 1885. Then, the Indian River Steamboat Co. boldly decided to launch a railroad line.
The Jupiter and Lake Worth Railway was nicknamed "The Celestial Railroad" after a popular poem. It took 35 minutes to travel the 7½-miles between Jupiter and Juno on Lake Worth.
They named the terminus Juno, who was Jupiter's divine partner.
From mid-1889, the number of visitors to the Palm Beach region mushroomed, as did the trade in produce and goods.
Courtesy LOC
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The railroad's route ran through the heart of today’s Juno Beach.
Heading southeast from Jupiter, tracks ran on our Ocean Drive coastal dune. Upon reaching the Pelican Lake marshland, they veered inland and bypassed Little Lake Worth.
It ran until 1895, when Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad made it redundant by offering a faster, more comfortable, and direct northern line.
The steamer Lake Worth would pick up the Celestial's passengers at the Juno dock. The adventurous, well-to-do visitors were let off at their comfortable lakeside hotels in Riviera and Palm Beach.
The boat stopped at other docks when required. At the south end of the lake at Hypoluxo, it soon became possible to get land transportation down to Biscayne.
Courtesy HSPBC