Echoes of Englewood

Hamilton Disston was an early Florida land baron. He purchased the land on Cape Haze from the state in 1881, for 25 cents an acre. When Alfred and William Vanderbilt bought the same property in 1951, they paid $40 per acre. In 1961, they sold 10,000 acres to General Development Corp. for $400 an acre.

In 1971, when Cavanagh Leasing Corp. bought the remaining Vanderbilt property, they paid $730 an acre.

Mr. & Mrs. Herman C. Kluge came here in 1919 because of his affiliation with the Woodmere Lumber Company. He was a forest cruiser, who scouted out potential timber lands for Woodmere. At that time they bought 33 acres of land in Englewood, some of it bay front property, for $2,500 making it about $75 per acre.

Joe Whitehead was quoted several years ago as saying when Englewood was still a fishing village in 1930’s, the commercial fishermen equipped their boats with smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes away.
Whitehead used an old dutch oven with lightered pine cut into strips and green mangrove leaves to make the smoke.

“You’d fish for 10 minutes until the mosquitoes got bad, then step into the smudge for a few minutes, and you were good for another 10 or 25 minutes. In the morning when it got daylight, it would look like the boats all over the bay were on fire.

He also said that as a boy he used to take oysters from Lemon Bay. They were so large, the liquor drained from only 30 of them would fill a quart jar. He sold them for 50 cents a quart.