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."
Read more about this topic: Port Everglades
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)