Footage of downtown Lake Worth from ninety years ago.

If you are familiar with Lake Worth Beach, specifically along Federal Hwy. in the Downtown, you’ll recognize a church structure that still exists to this day. The short film at the end of this blog post is a,

“Compilation of sound interviews with some of the oldest people living in the United States in 1929. Footage is from the early Movietone sound cameras.”

For some perspective, one man in the video (see below) says he is 84 years old, the man next to him is 94 years old. That would mean at the start of the Civil War in 1861 they were both 16 and 26 years old, respectively.

The Civil War ended in 1865. After the war one of the big draws to Florida for former soldiers was construction of Henry Flagler’s railroad in the early 1880s to lay track, build bridges, and provide security against the Seminole tribes. The Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad formed “Palm Beach” in 1894, then Flagler continued south towards a place that would later come to be called “Miami” building railroad stations along the way.

In 1912 a small station was constructed south of West Palm ‘Beach’ (a city still without a beach) and that place south of West Palm would become the “Town of Lake Worth” in 1913 that actually did have a beach.

Early residents from what would be called the Town of Lake Worth — prior to the ‘Town’ acquiring a beach on the Atlantic Ocean — continued west draining the Florida Everglades as they went. Later they created places that would become the City of Atlantis and a village you may have heard of: Wellington. And the march west continues to this day with the creation of so-called ‘agrihoods’ such as the planned community of Arden west of Wellington.

‘Lake Worth’ continues to carry the sad legacy of western development in Palm Beach County. Many of these places in the modern era call themselves Lake Worth because of another migration that began around 1960 when the elites and those with the means abandoned this coastal City to create their own relentlessly sprawling vision that one sees today: cookie-cutter communities for as far as the eye can see and many of them surrounded by walls and dense hedges.

The video below is an interesting look back to the pre-Depression era in South Florida. The segment about the then-City of Lake Worth ends at the 3:30 minute mark.

The march west from the original Town of Lake Worth followed the path of development all across the United States fueled in part by WWI and WWII. Those early pioneers and farmers cannot be blamed for western development. They were encouraged to come in droves.

But what cannot ever be forgotten are all those who abandoned the City of Lake Worth 50–60 years ago and headed west calling themselves ‘Lake Worth’.

Click on play and see if you can recognize a
very prominent structure that still exists to this day
in Lake Worth Beach: