Palm Beach

Palm Beach owes its palms to a shipwreck. On January 9, 1878, the Spanish brigantine *Providencia* wrecked off Florida’s coast carrying 20,000 coconuts. Pioneer William Lanehart bought the wreck from its insurance company for $20.80, and the coconuts were offered to local settlers for two-and-a-half cents each. After only about 1,100 sold, many of the rest were planted across the island. Coconut palms aren’t native to Florida, but within less than a decade, the barrier island was covered in them.

The groves caught the eye of Standard Oil co-founder Henry Morrison Flagler, who called the Lake Worth region “a veritable paradise” when he arrived in 1893. On February 11, 1894, he opened the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and shortly afterward his Florida East Coast Railway reached West Palm Beach. The enormous hotel eventually accommodated roughly 2,000 guests and was billed as both the largest hotel and largest wooden structure in the world.

Flagler transformed Palm Beach into one of America’s great winter resorts while developing a commercial city across Lake Worth for the people who worked there. That settlement became West Palm Beach. What began with thousands of unwanted coconuts scattered after a shipwreck had, within a generation, helped give Palm Beach both its landscape and its name.