History
Port Everglades is composed of land within three municipalities, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Dania Beach and unincorporated Broward County. Port Everglades is a man-made seaport, dredged out of a natural body of water called Lake Mabel. Lake Mabel was a wide and shallow section of the Florida East Coast Canal system. The Florida Board of Trade passed a resolution in 1911 calling for a deepwater port to ship farmers' produce to the North and the West. In 1913, the Fort Lauderdale Harbor Company was formed and eventually dug out the Lake Mabel Cut, opening the New River to the sea for small boats. In 1924, Joseph Wesley Young, founder and mayor of the city of Hollywood, Florida bought 1,440 acres (5.8 km2) of land adjacent to the lake and created Hollywood Harbor Development Company. In 1927, the Florida State Legislature established the Broward County Port Authority. On February 22, 1928, 85 percent of Broward County's residents gathered for a ceremony in which President Calvin Coolidge was to push a button from the White House detonating explosives to remove the rock barrier separating the harbor from the Atlantic Ocean. The button malfunctioned, but the barrier was removed shortly thereafter.
Bay Mabel Harbor was dedicated on February 22, 1928. Several local women's clubs decided a new name was needed to represent the region and conducted a name changing contest. The name Port Everglades was chosen to represent the seaport as "The gateway to the rich agricultural area embraced in the 4 million acres (16,000 km²) at the Port's very backdoor."
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“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
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“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)