Paradise or Purgatory: The Challenges of Living in Flamingo

Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes have always been a major deterrent to Flamingo’s residents. During the early years, stories abound of cows and mules left out overnight being killed by swarms of mosquitoes. Residents equipped every house with a smudge pot and a palmetto fan.

This image of a Florida East Coast Railway employee in Cape Sable near Flamingo shows him wearing a mosquito net and carrying a smudge pot and a palmetto leaf as weapons to fight off the swarm of mosquitoes around him. These items are what residents and visitors would use in the “loser” rooms to rid themselves of mosquitoes before entering the house.

Florida Memory (RC14007, public domain)

Weary residents placed outside their houses smudge pots in which they burned black mangrove wood to help ward off the mosquitoes. Imagine upon entering a house having to brush yourself off with a palmetto fan in a room called a “loser,” because it was where you were supposed to lose your mosquitoes! In 1893, naturalist Leverett White Brownell visited Flamingo and described the village as “shacks on stilts infested with fleas and mosquitos.” Brownell even claimed to have seen an oil lamp extinguished by a cloud of mosquitoes!

Mosquitoes Chase Department of Agriculture Inspectors Away

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began a program to eliminate wild cotton plants from Florida, including the coast along Florida Bay, in 1932. However, USDA employees reported the difficulty they had surveying the area. One man remembered, "“In June of 1932 several inspectors in seeking out new locations of wild cotton made their way into the Cape Sable area. It is my recollection that the mosquitoes were so bad that these men got out of their cars and quickly gathered a few bolls which were brought back to Miami and examined.” Later in the 1930s, the USDA tried to operate Works Progress Administration (WPA) camps in the Cape Sable area. Even in the depths of the Great Depression with unemployment at record highs, the USDA could not find enough men interested in working in the area.

The leaves and branches of black mangroves, like those pictured here, would have been burned in the smudge pots to ward off mosquitos. This black mangrove hammock was photographed about 4 miles east of Cape Sable in April 1916.

Florida Memory (SM0206, public domain)

Today, visitors to the Flamingo Visitor Center will find a "mosquito-meter" that warns them of the current intensity of the mosquito population.

Most years the return of mosquitoes during the rainy spring and summer was a predictable occurrence. But for Flamingo residents without modern weather prediction technology, tropical storms and hurricanes posed irregular but serious danger to their existence on the margins of Florida Bay. What could you do to prepare for hurricanes if you did not know when they were coming?

CHALLENGES OF LIVING IN FLAMINGO

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  Isolation

  Simple structures like this dotted the landscape in the Flamingo area in the first half of the 1900s.

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  Tropical Weather

  Hurricanes sweep across South Florida, leaving trails of destruction.

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  Making a Living

  The rich natural resources in Florida Bay lure people trying to make a living.

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  The NPS in Flamingo

  The National Park Service transforms life in Flamingo after Everglades National Park is dedicated in 1947.