History
Elliott Key was used on a transient basis for millennia by Tequesta Indians, and later by fishermen and wreckers from the Bahamas and the lower Florida Keys. The earlier name for the key was Ledbury Key, named after a snow that was driven ashore in 1769. There are legends of Elliott Key and adjacent keys being used as a refuge by pirates and escaped slaves. The chief pirate of legend is Black Caesar, who is said to have escaped from a slave ship, and used Elliott Key as his base. The key was inhabited and the site of pineapple plantations in the latter part of the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century. In 1910 there were more than a dozen families raising pineapples on Elliott Key where an average crop was 50,000 to 75,000 dozen fruits, mostly sent by schooner to New York.
In the 1950s it was proposed to build a causeway (across the Safety Valve) and highway from Key Biscayne to Key Largo, connecting Elliott Key and other keys to the mainland and the rest of the Florida Keys. This led to the incorporation of the city of Islandia, Florida, encompassing the keys north of Key Largo up to the Ragged Keys. In anticipation of the highway, and to forestall designation of the northernmost keys as a park, developers cleared most of the land on Elliott Key and dredged channels around it. With the establishment of the Biscayne National Monument in 1968 and purchase of private property in the park by the Federal government, development of the highway and of Elliott Key was halted, and the money that was allocated for the proposed causeway was used to build a replacement Card Sound Bridge connecting northern Key Largo to the mainland.
On August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew made landfall on Elliot Key.
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)