Some 70,000 years ago the oceans began to
rise at a rapid rate, inundating coastal lands around the
world, including Florida. This continued unabated over the
centuries until about 5000 BC when the oceans stopped
rising, allowing the Florida Keys to remain as land, but
only a few feet above sea level. This is the Miracle of the
Keys, and it is why Ramrod Key today is a low island, not a
submerged reef.
Our
island was officially recognized by the name
Ramrod Key in a Government survey in the
mid-1800s. In June 1857, a survey report was filed by US
Surveyor C.T. Iardella, who described Ramrod Key as covered
with heavy mangrove, palmetto, sea grape and buttonwood with
an outer shore of coral rock. The surveyor also noted a
lagoon (salt pond) on the western side with depths of five
to fifteen inches. By 1878, Ramrod Key was showing on
Government charts.
It is said that Ramrod Key got its name
from a ship named “Ramrod” that was wrecked out on the coral
reef in the early 19th Century (source Jim Kupper,
Islamorada Library). According to Webster’s, a
ramrod is “a rod used for ramming home the charge in a
muzzle-loading firearm.”
Early Residents
Long before our island was officially
named and charted it was visited by Calusa Indians, but
apparently occupied only as a refuge from the warlike Creek
Indians, who were induced by English settlers to make slave
raids on the Calusas. Finally, chased by the Creeks and
decimated by European diseases, the remaining Calusas
escaped to Cuba and were assimilated into the local
population. Before the Calusas, there was probably a small
population of other Indians occupying some of the Keys
islands but there is very little evidence.
The only known prehistoric physical signs
of previous occupancy of our BBECA subdivision were remnants
of a “native rock” wall near the southeast point of Ramrod.
An old-timer reported that there was once a pig farm
there.
Newcomers
In the late 1800s and early
1900s, the Lower Keys were sparsely populated, mostly by
sponge fishermen and others living from the sea. They lived
in primitive conditions – driftwood shacks with palmetto
thatch roofs – and supplemented their diets with venison
(Key Deer meat). Over the years, small communities would
form and then vanish to be replaced by others. Some people
came from south Florida but many others from the Bahamas.
The 1870 census listed 3 families on Ramrod Key, with a
total of twelve people. The 1910 census again listed 3
families, now with 11 people, none of whom carried the same
names as in 1870. The 1935 census listed only 3 people,
again all different names. Apparently, Ramrod was a hard
place to eke out a living.
In
spite of our low population, a Post Office and general store
was established here in 1917 and remained open at least
until 1938. It was located on the higher ground just west of
the present location of the FKAA pumping station.
Most Ramrod activity in all
the years before 1957 appears to have been centered on this
ridge area where both the old auto road (1928) and the
railroad (1912) crossed the island. But the train didn’t
stop at the Post Office; it merely hooked a suspended bag of
mail as it roared through.
There was one
not-to-be-forgotten resident of Ramrod in the early years
(at least until 1960) who lived in a small house in the
woods somewhere. Her name was Nellie Shanahan and she was
called by one writer “the pioneer woman” of Ramrod. Nellie
embraced “Irish Mysticism” and believed in signs and
portents. In August of 1960 she predicted that Donna, the
huge hurricane of 1960, would strike Ramrod. It did just
that on September 9th.
Although Nellie was a
recluse, she was also a poet and wrote Edgar Allan Poe type
verses like:
Roads and railroads
About all one could say about Ramrod Key
until the 1950s was that “a road ran through it.” Neither
Henry Flagler’s famous Overseas Railroad nor the auto road
seemed to have much effect on life here. The railroad was a
straight run through the Keys, operating from 1912 until the
giant hurricane of 1935 crippled it fatally, and it was
replaced by Highway US 1 in January of 1938. But the earlier
128.5-mile auto road through the Keys, which opened in 1928,
was more idiosyncratic: it ran from Miami only to Matecumbe,
where one took a 40-mile ferry ride to No Name Key ($3.50 -
$6.50, including dinner), then across the Old Wooden Bridge
to Big Pine and across Watson Boulevard, thence by bridge
and road across to the Torches and Ramrod before continuing
to Key West.
Latecomers
Residential
development of Ramrod started north of the present US 1 in
the later 50s. By 1959, a grid of roads had been constructed
in the middle of north Ramrod and some development had taken
place on the west shore.
The Looe Key Reef Resort Motel was being
built by Max Bennett. But Breezeswept Beach Estates was
still only a vision in the mind of developer Richard Jaffe.
In 1959 Jaffe was busy buying up the land (under mortgage
from Neil Knowles), getting permits, and creating a “Declaration
of Restrictions” (filed December 30th, 1959).
Land clearing, reclamation and construction began in 1960
when Jaffe brought in work crews, heavy equipment and
dynamite, and began construction of the canals. He
envisioned a village of up to 3,000 people!
Eddie (“Captain Eddie”) Williams surveyed
the Breezeswept subdivision for Jaffe and laid out the
canals. He was hired because he had one of only two survey
transits in the Keys.
He
said that after the survey lines were drawn an explosives
expert from Miami (Lonzo Coffin) came to Ramrod to drill
holes within the canal boundaries, maybe five at a time, and
then load each with three sticks of dynamite – BANG!
Then the draglines came in and dug out
the loosened rock and marl. This material was used to
elevate the lots Jaffe was building (about 612 in total) on
top of the mangrove and scrub covered lowland. When
completed, the lots were scarcely more than 2½ feet above
sea level. Most required additional fill before houses were
built. Lots sold for $1,490 – $25 down and $25 a month.
Taxes ran about $5 per lot per year.
It was a bootstrap operation. Jaffe
borrowed large sums and paid his crew partly in lots rather
than cash. The roads were dirt; water came through a surface
pipe. The first houses, built as demonstrators in 1961 and
1962, were those at 281 and 951 West Indies Drive, one at
each of the island’s two open water points. For these,
Jaffee dredged shallow channels into Newfound Harbor for
boat access.
A single deep canal was built at the
southern end of Ramrod to connect the whole canal system
(the mile-long main canal and 16 side canals) to the harbor.
In
the 1960s rattlesnakes were abundant and worrying residents.
So a Mr. Louis Lowe with help of the “Fire Brigade” took
charge and burned off numerous lots and shot the snakes as
they fled the fire.
By 1973, there were 53 houses on Ramrod
Key, and Jim and Elaine Moore were building the Chevron
station and store. The water supply came to us through a
small unburied pipe snaking along the roadside. In 1981 we
had about 100 houses and by 2001 about 290 houses, with
several new ones under construction. Today, all modern
utilities are now available. The County cooperates well with
BBECA on maintenance of streets by the Roads Department and
provision of security by the Sheriff’s Department.
The Filming of PT 109 by Warner
Brothers
In
the summer of 1962 Warner Brothers were filming PT 109,
the saga of Jack Kennedy as a PT skipper in WWII, starring
Oscar-winner Cliff Robertson.
Much of the action took place at Little
Palm Island – then called Sheriff’s or Munson Island and
owned by John Spottswood, who was County Sheriff at that
time. To create a village look, Warner
Brothers built many shacks and planted palm trees.
Other action was filmed around Newfound
Harbor and the smaller islands like Picnic and Bird. The old
dredged harbor on the west side of Ramrod Key, near US 1,
was the logistics base for the film crew. This harbor and
Little Palm were owned by the Spottswood family, who
facilitated the filming in many ways. Local boatmen piloted
PT 109 during all the action except when there were
close-ups of Cliff Robertson at the helm. John Spottswood,
dressed in Navy garb, piloted one of the other PT boats.
Little Palm Island, now among the ten top
resorts in the world, was described in a PT 109
filming report in Newsweek in 1962 as “a palm
covered, gnat ridden, mosquito infested, eight-acre sand
dab, broiling under the sun amidst the tepid, shark infested
waters of the Florida coast .” But for the
film crew, Newsweek reported : “The discomfort
of the location is nothing compared to the deadly dullness
of the yellow-backed 134 page script marked ‘3d Rev. Final.
PT 109. June 15, 1962’.”
Because PT 109 was filmed during
Kennedy’s administration, cooperation from the Navy in
furnishing ships for the movie was easy – a destroyer from
Key West participated along with three air-sea rescue boats
converted to PTs. But Warner Brothers found it necessary to
publicize locally that the destroyer and other ships were
here for the movie, not for another Bay of Pigs type
invasion. The movie was released in 1963, five months before
Kennedy was assassinated. BBECA owns a video tape of PT
109 which is available to members.
Cliff
Sawyer was 15 in 1962 when Warner Brothers rounded up
members of his “Graveyard Boys” in Key West to work for $11
a day from June until September. Cliff was selected for
several roles, which meant he had to take a Greyhound bus at
5:30am every day to get from Key West to the crew base on
Ramrod, and then catch the special boat to Little Palm.
Cliff was the first paddle in the canoe
scenes when “natives” rescued Kennedy and his crew from an
imaginary South Pacific island (Little Palm). When asked to
take a role as a Japanese sailor because they were short on
ethnic Japanese, he said, “But I’m a black.” The director
said, “It doesn’t matter, in uniform at that distance no one
will know.” Cliff Robertson didn’t call Sawyer “Cliff,” he
called him “Namesake” and told him that even movie stars
“put their pants on one leg at a time.”
According to Cliff, a major scene where PT
109 crashes into a dock house was accidental, not planned,
but the cameraman was alert and got it on film. The
Japanese “Zeroes” that bombed Little Palm were actually
surplus AT-6 navy trainers fixed up for the job, including
painting the Japanese rising sun emblem on their wings. One
old twin-engine Cessna, dubbed the “Bamboo Bomber” was also
used in the film. All of the planes were parked at the
Marathon Airport. The aerial bombing effects were actually
created not from bombs dropped from the sky, but from
explosives planted on Little Palm Island and in surrounding
waters, where they killed thousands of fish in the process.
Cliff is now a commercial fisherman and a
professional vocalist. His specialty is singing traditional
ballads. He tells of soothing the PT 109 movie
stars at Little Palm Island forty years ago with his
ballads, the same ones he now sings to resort guests on
Saturday nights. A disabled Vietnam vet, Cliff also provides
spiritual guidance to prisoners at the Big Pine Key Road
Prison.
We wish to thank historian John Viele of
Cudjoe Key for all his help in providing much of the
historical information. John is the author of three books on
Florida Keys history, published by Pineapple Press and
available at local book sellers. Thanks also go to Tom
Hambright, historian at the Key West Library, for his
generous assistance.
For more historical information on the Florida
Keys, visit the Mile Markers web site,
www.mile-markers.org