The origins of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church go back to 1948, when Reverend Father John K. Coolidge, Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, met with a small group of Pompano residents at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Horace P. Robinson.

Two years later a mission was started in Pompano Beach and the first service was held on October 27, 1950, at the Chamber of Commerce building. Later that year land for a permanent home for the congregation was acquired through a donation of land along the Intracoastal from William L. Kester and Mr. and Mrs. M.A. Hortt of Fort Lauderdale.

The church's construction was completed in the summer of 1951. The current sanctuary was completed in 1962, with the dedication service being held on February 25 of that year.

The opening of the Pompano Beach Broward County Jail facility on Blount Road was delayed not only by well over a year of construction delays, but also by the contractor losing the master key. About 800 locks had to be changed before the jail could be populated.

(from Eliot Kleinberg, Weird Florida II: In a State of Shock, p. 46)

Pompano Beach's St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, located at 1111 East Sample Road, was founded on December 6, 1959, The Feast of St. Nicholas, when thirty-six people attended the first service of worship.

As noted before, a number of local roads are named after pioneer Pompano farmers. One such is Lyons Road:

Lyons Road, now a major north-south thoroughfare, originally stretched from Palm Beach County south to Cypress Creek (the C-14 canal), then turned west at what is now West Atlantic Boulevard to dead end at the Two Mile Canal (now Riverside Drive in Coral Springs). Portions of Lyons Road came into existence north of what is now Coconut Creek Parkway simple because drainage of an agricultural area known as Punkin Swamp required digging of shale and sludge that was piled up alongside a drainage ditch. Flattened out, it became the base of a road that was eventually paved.

(excerpted from A History of Coconut Creek, Part 1)

The First Baptist Church of Pompano Beach was officially formed on May 4, 1915, with the following charter members:

Mr. & Mrs. Ed Cook
Mrs. Rachel Hardin
Mrs. Kitty Hardy
Mr. & Mrs. A. J. McGaughy
Mr. & Mrs. W. A. Petsch
Mr. Cleve Rucker
Mr. & Mrs. R. B. Rucker
Mr. W. C. Rucker
Mrs. L. Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Joseph P. Smoak
Mr. & Mrs. Lewis R. Smoak
Mrs. E. J. Walker
Mrs. John Warren
Mr. & Mrs. George D. Wyse

Until the Baptists built their own church building in 1922, the congregation met at the Methodist Church.

Initially, at least, baptisms were conducted in the Pompano Canal.

In 1934, Broward County Truck Farms, Inc., a corporation owned by H. L. "Bud" Lyons and B. F. Bailey, bought 6,200 acres west of Pompano. This land transaction constituted the largest single transfer of land in the county since the days of the Land Boom, a decade earlier.

In 1899, Lewis R. Smoak, his daughter Lillian and son Oliver, came to Pompano. It is said that he was the first farmer in the area to plant beans, a vegetable that quickly became the "crop of choice."

Born July 23, 1847, in South Carolina, Smoak had enlisted in the Confederate Army just one week after his sixteenth birthday. According to his pension application, he was sent to Augusta, Georgia, to make shoes for the Confederate Navy.

In Pompano's early years, a number of residents were veterans of the Civil War, including the town's first mayor, John Mizell.

The following biographical information on one of Pompano Beach's pioneer residents was written by Iola Swain Knowles and is excerpted from Making History Together at Mount Calvary Baptist Church, published in 1983.

Deacon [Jack] Swain was born [on August 6, 1880] in Jacksonville, Georgia, to Mr. and Mrs. Primous Swain. As a young man he worked as a lumberjack. As soon as they finished cutting timber in one area, they moved to another camp. He moved to Callahan, Florida. Here he met Nella Rhone, born August 14, 1885 and died March 11, 1963. In 1904 Jack and Nella were joined together in Holy Matrimony.

Deacon Swain first came to Pompano as a migrant worker in 1906. After being in this area he met Mr. Turner, a farmer, who asked him would he like to become one of his sharecroppers. He accepted Mr. Turner's offer and stayed until the end of the farming season. During the summer, he returned to Callahan where his family was living. After trying farming for several years, Deacon Swain in 1909 moved his family to Pompano.

He joined Mount Calvary Baptist Church in 1910 [the year it was founded], and was ordained a deacon in 1914 by the late Reverend J. T. Brown who was the pastor. Mrs. Swain was converted and baptized in 1915 by the late Reverend L. J. Ely, who also stayed with the Swains on those Sundays dedicated for service by the church membership.

Deacon Swain passed away on July 20, 1947.

The Swains had eight children: Iola, Earnest, Louis, Bernice, Rufus, Willie, Mildred and Myrtle.

Jack Swain followed a common practice among early settlers, both black and white, of working in the area for several seasons before moving to Pompano with his family.

The Mr. Turner referred to above, may have been A. W. Turner, Pompano resident and the first Broward County Sheriff.

It is easy to forget that the people who first came to this area brought with them historical memories of events we consider far, far in the past. One way to understand this is to imagine a historical event happening today, and project back to other events.

If Pompano Beach was incorporated today (2006):

The Florida East Coast Railway would have arrived in 1994.
The Civil War would have ended in 1963.
Florida would have become a state in 1943.
The Dade Massacre beginning the Second Seminole War would have occurred in 1933.
The United States would have purchased Florida from Spain in 1919.

Thus, it is not hard to see that there would be many people in early Pompano who had clear memories of the Civil War. Some old-timers may have remembered when Florida was still a territory and the Seminole Wars raged throughout the peninsula. It's even possible that one or two residents were born when Florida was still a Spanish colony.

In the early 1920s, the Blount brothers, George, Devotie and William, farmed about 200 acres. About three-quarters of their land was planted in beans, with the remainder split between eggplants, peppers and tomatoes.

During the 1920-21 farming season, the Blounts sent 15,000 hampers of beans to northern markets.

In 1997, the Genealogical Society of Broward County published a book titled Pioneer Cemeteries of Broward County, Fla. The publication uses information from tombstones and office records to produce a "census" of individuals buried in the county's oldest cemeteries in Dania, Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Hallandale and Pompano Beach.

Data on the Pompano Beach South Lawn Cemetery is available online.

The Pompano Cemetery, located off Federal Highway, south of Atlantic Boulevard, was originally created in the early years of the twentieth century on ten acres donated by the Model Land Company, a subsidiary of the Florida East Coast Railway.

In the early years Seminole Indians were a common sight in Pompano, as Lorena Robson recounted in her 1974 history of the community:

Trading was done at the general store or trading post, which stood at the corner of what is now Flagler Avenue and N.E. First Street. Skins and furs were traded for cloth, beads and foodstuffs needed. While the traders bartered, other Indians sat under the lean-to shelter or squatted on the ground. All children were taught to say hello with the greeting -- "hum gaw."

After provisions and trinkets were secured, the procession, walking single file, returned to their dug-outs or boats hewn out of logs . . . and drifted and poled slowly back up what is known as the Pompano canal, where they remained in the Glades until ready to barter again.

This account was probably from the second decade of the twentieth century, as construction on the Pompano canal did not begin until 1912.

Although the Washington Senators relocated to Texas for the 1972 baseball season, the team continued to conduct spring training in Pompano Beach through 1986.

Sports writer Mike Shropshire does not put on his rose-colored glasses as he recounts his memories of spring training here:

The Texas Rangers had moved to Arlington in 1972, and conducted spring training at Pompano Beach, Fla. The team headquarters was the Surf Rider, a dive that resembled a minimum-security halfway house. It was right on the beach, though, and therefore heavenly.

The spring training of my experience was not a family scene. The schedule for the Major League Baseball beat writer went as follows: Get up, gargle with English Leather, and stroll the beach. Then I'd return to my room at the Surf Rider with its mildewed walls and do an hour's worth of research for the work day ahead. That amounted to studying the racing form to handicap the first five races at Gulfstream. After returning from the track, I'd report to Pompano Stadium, making sure to arrive late enough that the game would be over, and get a copy of the box score.

Next, I would locate Whitey Herzog, the manager, who by 5 p.m. would be located at the Surf Rider bar, actively anesthetizing his brain from the troubling occupational circumstances that confronted him.

Whitey had reason to be troubled. In his single season of managing the club, the Rangers won only 57 games against 105 losses, the worst record in the major leagues that year.

Following the 1960 season, team owner Calvin Griffith moved the Washington Senators baseball team to Minnesota. A new team was formed for Washington D.C., also called the Senators.

From 1961 to 1971 this version of the Senators held spring training at Pompano Beach's Municipal Stadium. There were few stars on the team -- probably the most notable player was Frank Thomas, who won the league home run crown in 1968 and 1970 (44 HRs in each year). In fact, the players were overshadowed by their managers and coaches, some of whom were Gil Hodges, Ted Williams and Nellie Fox.

The Senators had only one season over .500, and had trouble drawing fans. Following the 1971 season, the team moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and became the Texas Rangers.

The Pompano Beach Historical Society's public program for February will feature Eliot Kleinberg, author of the recently-published Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928.

Almost two years to the day after a devastating hurricane had hit southern Florida in 1926, another killer storm swept ashore. The '26 hurricane had hit Miami; the eye of the '28 hurricane passed over Palm Beach County, practically eradicating the communities along the Lake Okeechobee shoreline. Altogether over 7,000 people died as a result of the 1928 hurricane, one of the greatest hurricane death tolls in American history.

Although south of the eye's path, Pompano sustained significant damage from the storm.

Eliot Kleinberg, a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, is the author and co-author seven other books. In addition to his book on the 1928 Hurricane, he has written Weird Florida, and it's follow-up, Weird Florida II:In A State of Shock. Kleinberg is also the author of War In Paradise: Stories of World War II in Florida.

The program will take place on Wednesday, February 15, 2006, at 7:00 PM, at the Dick & Miriam Hood Center (217 NE 4th Avenue,Pompano Beach). The program is free and open to the public.

Some early twentieth century maps of this area show both Pompano and a "West Pompano."

The reason for this is that the original Pompano post office was located in George Butler's home near Lettuce Lake (Lake Santa Barbara). After the arrival of the Florida East Coast Railway, and the beginning of commercial development near the tracks, another post office was located in M. Z. Cavender's general store at Flagler Avenue and NE First Street. To distinguish the two, the latter was named West Pompano.

In 1902 the two post offices were combined, and West Pompano was no more.

Before Temple Sholom was completed in 1960, the local Jewish congregation met in a variety of locations in Pompano Beach: the Pompano Beach Chamber of Commerce, First Methodist Church, Pompano Beach High School, Pompano Beach Garden Center and Pompano Beach Elementary School. Passover Seders were held at an Italian restaurant.