Miami founded

The same spirit of exploration that brought Christopher Columbus to American shores also brought Juan Ponce de Leon, who first sighted the land he called La Florida and then Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded the settlement of St. Augustine. The following year Avilés went to the land of Biscayne Bay, establishing another foothold and a tentative claim to the land. By the early 1800s the settlement grew with an influx of settlers from England, but at the end of the century, it was still known as Biscayne Bay Country until a woman with dreams of a city intervened.

On this day, July 28, in 1896 a group of 400 men met to vote in favor of the incorporation of their land into Miami city. The meeting was prompted by Julia Tuttle, “Mother of Miami”, who long actively encouraged the development of a city, and was ignored almost as long.

Tuttle knew Miami needed to develop to be recognized as a city — and for development, they needed a link to the population centers to the north. Tuttle made numerous attempts to persuade the railroad magnate Henry Flagler to connect his railroad to Ford Dallas, in Biscayne Bay, offering him large land grants in the area, but Flagler demurred — until the Great Freeze of 1894-1895 destroyed most of northern and central Florida’s orange crop. Suddenly South Florida was a much more enticing locale.