History
In the mid-19th century the body of water that is now the Lake Worth Lagoon was a fresh water lake. The lake had been named Lake Worth in honor of William J. Worth, commander of the Eighth Infantry Regiment in the Second Seminole War. There were no rivers or streams flowing into the lake; all of the flow into the lake was by ground seepage from the Everglades to the west. The only outflow from the lake was through a swamp that became the Lake Worth Creek as it approached the Loxahatchee River and Jupiter Inlet. Extreme high tides and waves, high lake water levels and storms occasionally caused the formation of temporary inlets that quickly closed up again. When there was no inlet available, the settlers in the area had to haul their boats over the barrier beaches to move them between the ocean and the lake.
In 1866 travelers reported that fresh water was pouring out of the lake into the ocean at a point about ten miles (16 km) south of the Jupiter Inlet. One report is that a settler named Lang had dug the channel to open an inlet, and it was known as Lang's Inlet for a while. This cut drained the lake down to sea level. The limited inflow of ocean water through the inlet and continued seepage of fresh water from the Everglades kept the lake from becoming more than mildly brackish. Lang's Inlet was unstable, and had to be dug out again every few months. Construction of a stable inlet at the Black Rocks one mile (1.6 km) north of Lang's Inlet was finally achieved in 1877. The lake immediately began to change to a saltwater lagoon. The completion of a navigation canal from the north end of Lake Worth Lagoon to Jupiter Inlet in the 1880s resulted in increased freshwater discharges to the lagoon.
In the early 1900s, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway was completed from the south end of the Lagoon to Biscayne Bay. By 1915, the Port of Palm Beach had created a permanent inlet four feet deep at the old location of Lang's Inlet, which was deepened to 16 feet (4.9 m) in 1925. In 1917 the South Lake Worth Inlet was created in a failed effort to improve tidal circulation and provide flushing to the south end of the Lagoon. The completion of the West Palm Beach Canal (which connected to Lake Okeechobee, draining land west of West Palm Beach as well as the Everglades) in 1925 resulted in significant freshwater inflow to the lagoon.
Read more about this topic: Lake Worth Lagoon
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