The quarterly tour of the Hillsboro Lighthouse originally scheduled for May 6th, has been postponed to June 3rd so as not to coincide with the Air and Sea Show.

For more information, visit the Hillsboro Lighthouse Preservation Society website.

During Prohibition, South Florida was a hotbed for the smuggling of illegal liquor, and Pompano was no exception.

It is alleged that at nighttime boats bringing booze from the Bahamas would slip in through the Hillsboro Inlet and then up the Pompano canal to off-load their cargo.

According to one resident at the time, bootleg liquor was packed among the crates of vegetables on freight trains for shipment north.

The City of Coral Springs was incorporated on July 10, 1963, but its origins can be traced to December 14, 1961, when Coral Ridge Properties purchased 3,860 acres of land in northwest Broward county from Lena Lyons for $1 million.

In order to make the land eligible for incorporation as a City under Florida law, the development company moved three wooden shacks onto the land, along with four Coral Ridge Properties employees.

One of the other names that were considered for the new municipality was "Pompano Springs."

In addition to serving as Florida's Governor and U.S. Senator, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, after whom this county was named, was one of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for Vice President in 1908. His progressive politics, charismatic personality and colorful past appealed to the delegates.

However, the party's Presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, indicated that he would rather balance the ticket with a midwesterner rather than a southerner and the convention nominated John Worth Kern of Indiana instead.

Henry Flagler is arguably the most significant figure in South Florida history. Here are a few facts having to do with him that might not be well known:

The original name for Flagler's The Breakers Hotel was the Palm Beach Inn. The hotel did not get its current name until 1901, five years after it was constructed.

Miami was incorporated in 1896, following the arrival of the FEC Railway. Initially, its citizens wanted to name the city "Flagler". Henry declined the honor and urged that the Indian word "Miami" (alternately translated as "big water" or "sweet water") be used.

By the time that the FEC Railway arrived in Pompano, Flagler was 66 years old.

In 1901, the Florida Legislature passed a special bill making incurable insanity grounds for divorce. This allowed Flagler to divorce his second wife, who had been institutionalized for mental illness for a number of years, and marry for the third time.

With recent talk about the revival of passenger traffic on the Florida East Coast tracks in the form of a South Florida commuter train, there have been a number of questions about the former train station in Pompano Beach.

In fact, Pompano had two FEC stations, the most recent being demolished in 1968. It was constructed in the mid 1920s to replace the original wooden station that had been constructed soon after the arrival of the railway in 1896.

The first station was architecturally similar to other small stations the FEC built along its line, and was located alongside the tracks at about NE 1st Street. The second station was constructed of concrete block and was located a little bit north, at 226 North Dixie Highway.

During the Second World War, the Hillsboro Lighthouse was kept "dark" to prevent enemy submarines from using the beacon for navigational purposes.

The Palm Aire area of Pompano Beach was first developed in the 1950s when George Palmer and Harold Brolliar purchased 440 acres of pasture-land west of town and constructed a golf course, club house and motel.

In the 1960s, the development was purchased by the Orleans Construction Company (later renamed FPA Corporation) which purchased a large amount of additional acreage, much of it from McArthur Dairy, and built over 5,000 residential units as well as four additional golf courses.

Palm Aire was annexed into Pompano Beach in 1971.

When the Hillsboro Lighthouse was built, there were three cottages constructed for the lighthouse keeper and his two assistants. Three people were needed to keep the light and mechanisms operating 24 hours a day.

The lighthouse received electrical power in 1932, and the workload was reduced -- one assistant keeper position was eliminated. Also one of the cottages was sold to the Hillsboro Club and removed from government property.

When it opened in 1925, the Walton Hotel was deemed the "biggest and finest structure in the city." It was designed by Fort Lauderdale architect John Peterman, who would design the Broward County Courthouse a couple years later.

Located at the southeast corner of NE First Street and First Avenue, the three-story Walton Hotel contained 34 guest rooms and a dining room that was the place to eat Sunday dinner.

On this day in 1743, Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, was born in Albemarle County, Virginia.

On the 200th anniversary of his birth, April 13, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Florida East Coast Railway's arrival in South Florida created the transportation network that made large-scale agricultural production possible. In a 1930s publication looking at its history over the previous fifty years, this part of the railway's business was discussed:

The Florida East Coast Railway early adapted the character of its service to the highly perishable class of [agricultural] products which it was called upon to transport, operating fast, regular freight trains at express speed. Before the development of packing houses, side tracks and platforms were established at frequent intervals from which "pick-up" trains gathered the growers' produce, concentrating it into carloads and trainloads. The railway even issued weather warnings. Prior to the advent of radio, and its wide use in rural communities, Florida East Coast Railway locomotive engineers were required to sound six long blasts of the whistle at frequent intervals to warn growers that an approaching cold wave was predicted . . .

(Excerpted from The Story of a Pioneer, 1885-86 -- 1935-36, published by the Flagler System and reprinted by the Boca Raton Historical Society in The Spanish River Papers, October, 1974.)

At the beginning of the 20th century, Dade County stretched far to the north -- encompassing today's Broward, Palm Beach and Martin counties.

In 1901, there were at total of 997 students enrolled in 26 wooden schoolhouses throughout Dade County. This included only two schools located in what would become Broward County. There were 28 students at the school in Pompano and 15 in Fort Lauderdale. Both schools had first opened in 1899.

(from The History of the Broward County Schools)

In 1985, Dr. Cooper Kirk noted some of the factors that led to the formation of Broward County:

According to legend, Broward County, created in 1915, owes its corporate existence to the threat of the area's citizens to become either "wet" or "dry" with regard to the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. While interesting, such legends fail to gauge the canons of convenience and local self-determination inherent in Americans. In reality, county-seats, as centers of government and commerce, were hubs from which important matters were initiated and resolved.

[The Town of] Davie . . . became a proponent of local self-government because of the distance and inadequate transportation to Miami, the county-seat of Dade County. It was easier to travel by boat to Fort Lauderdale , the anticipated seat of the new county. Fort Lauderdale residents, a fierce and proud genre, raised their hackles at the very mention of Miami. They did not want to spend a day or more transacting legal, political and commercial affairs in their rival to the south.

Pompano residents easily figured that eight miles to Fort Lauderdale was better than thirty-four to West Palm Beach, the county-seat of Palm Beach County, in which both Pompano and Deerfield were located. Essential matters conducted nearer to home meant that their procedures were more responsible to local input by the majority who had the most to gain or lose.

(Excerpted from "Foundations of Broward County Waterways" by Cooper Kirk, in Broward Legacy, Winter/Spring, 1985. Paragraph breaks added.)

In 1896, the FEC Railway was completed from West Palm Beach to Miami,and various development companies began to promote South Florida, near and far. A little more than a year later, the Weekly Miami Metropolis ran a story that questioned the wisdom of recruiting new residents from too far afield:

Persistent and very expensive efforts are being constantly put forth to induce settlers from distant States to locate in Florida. Many inducements are held out to that class. Many of them are induced to settle in Florida, and what is the result? As a rule they are men who have been employed in offices, counting rooms, stores and factories, and know nothing whatever about farming. Even if they are farmers, they know practically nothing about those methods which are essential to success in Florida. After a year or two of injudicious attempts at farming in this State they frequently lose what little money they have and "cuss" the country when the fault is really with themselves -- not with our soil or climate.

It frequently does more harm than good to bring such people into this section. If the same money which is spent in bringing settlers from Michigan, Iowa and other Western states to Florida was expended in an effort to induce the people of those sections of our own State which have suffered so severely from the freeze to locate in this section, it seems to us the money would be far more wisely invested.

The freeze referred to was the one that hit most of Florida, save the most southerly parts, during the winter of 1894 and 1895. Supposedly that freeze provided the motivation for Henry Flagler to extend his railroad farther south.

One has to question, however, exactly how many northern and western settlers had come to South Florida by 1897, nevermind those who, as the newspaper claimed, lost their money after "a year or two of injudicious attempts at farming."

Everything is relative, I suppose.

(Excerpted from Broward Legacy, Winter/Spring, 1985)

Mrs. Ollie Tinney comments on Pompano in 1914:

This is the only town on the East Coast that is not made up principally of Northern people. There are no Northern people in the place except for the barber, who has moved here during the past two months. The population consists of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Carolina people. The barber came from Philadelphia.

(Originally published in the Tampa Morning Tribune, December 13, 1914. Reprinted in Broward Legacy, Summer/Fall 1979)

Many people know Eugene Theodore "Cap" Knight as the founder of Cap's Place Island Restaurant. Fewer know of his younger brother, Thomas.

Thomas Knight came to this area in 1911 to become the second keeper at the Hillsboro Lighthouse. Previously he had served as assistant keeper of the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse and then keeper of the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse. He was 32, married and had four children when he arrived at the remote station on Hillsboro Inlet.

Thomas was the third generation of keeper in his family -- both his father, J. A. Knight, and grandfather, Mills O. Burnham, had been keepers of the lighthouse at Cape Canaveral.

He served at Hillsboro Lighthouse until 1920.

Many Pompano residents remember the Coast Guard patrols on the beach during the Second World War. The servicemen were housed at the Silver Thatch Inn and used horses to keep watch over local shores.

But this was not the first time the Coast Guard performed this role here. During the First World War a number of Guardsmen were stationed at the Hillsboro Lighthouse. According to David Butler in his book, Hillsboro Lighthouse, "One of the [lighthouse's] storage buildings was converted to a barracks for a U. S. Coast Guard Beach Patrol. Four signalmen were stationed at the base, and they communicated with ships by semaphore flags or by using Morse code with lights."

George S. McClellan was Pompano's first resident physician -- his office still stands on the northeast corner of NE 1st Avenue and 2nd Street.

Dr. McClellan'’s office, supposedly was the first building in Pompano made of concrete reinforced with steel. During the 1926 hurricane this small building was the haven of safety sought by members of six families who remained clustered there during the terrific storm, for over 24 hours.