The City of Pahokee: Then and Now…

Spreading a total area of 2,383 square miles, Palm Beach County is the second largest county in Florida by land area. Located on the shore of Lake Okeechobee is the city of Pahokee, taken from the Seminole name for the Everglades, Pay-ha-o-kee, meaning “grassy waters.

Spanning five square miles, Pahokee was founded in the early 1900s. It’s known to some locals as “The Muck” for its mineral rich dark soil in which sugarcane, citrus fruits and corn were grown by agribusinesses. “Agriculture mechanization changed all of that,” writes the New York Times “…sugar replaced vegetables, and machines replaced workers.”

Much of the five square miles that became Pahokee was owned either by the State of Florida or the Southern States Land and Timber Company, which often allowed farmers to work the land without requiring purchase or rent payments. Dentist (A)lonzo Warrick “L. W.” Armstrong arrived in 1915. Celery grower B. A. Howard from Sanford, Florida, bought almost 400 acres and established the Pahokee Realty Company to sell it in parcels.

Driving through Pahokee on this 4th of July, I was taken aback by some of the architecture and found myself puzzling over their historic significance. Specifically on Main Street, stands a pink and white streamline moderne structure… the former site of Prince Theatre, a 500-seat theater was built in 1940 and showed first-run movies and live performances for about 25 years until it closed in the mid-1960s.