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"Florida Mango Grovelets" is what our tracts
of land are called on the tax rolls and in the record books.
What an odd little name! But what an odd little history those
properties have had. They were once, long ago, a grove, then a
marsh, then the "boondocks", and finally a real town, The Town
of Lake Clarke Shores, founded 45 years ago in 1957.
The first people to set their sights on the area, however, go
back to the early 1900's.
Pineapples promised big business in South Florida. John Clarke,
son of a Palm Beach pioneer, had the money to buy five acres of
land just south of the present Hillcrest Cemetery on Parker
Avenue. There he planted pineapples and built a packinghouse to
prepare the fruit for shipping to northern cities. An
agricultural blight and Henry Flagler's railroad destroyed South
Florida's pineapple farms. When the railroad extended to Key
West, Cuban "pinas" could be loaded and shipped to northern
markets more economically.
By 1915, Clarke, like most others, abandoned
his crop. Clarke's other businesses, including building the
first shaft-driven car in Pennsylvania, kept him from spending
the entire season in Palm Beach. But when he was here, his tract
of land was a perfect getaway. An avid fisherman, he could
escape the pressure of business by catching all the bass and
bream he wanted in the lake on the western edge of the land. He
named that lake "Lake Clarke", and with no one else around who
much cared what it was called, the name simply came to be.
Florida Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward would
transform Clarke's lake in 1917. Broward thought he
could drain the Everglades by cutting a few little
canals from Lake Okeechobee to the ocean and he
convinced the legislature to pass a comprehensive
drainage law. Lake Clarke suffered. When the canal
locks were opened a the spillway between Lake Worth
and West Palm Beach, the lake's water level dropped
eight feet. The 1 to 2-foot wading pool left in most
places was soon swallowed up by bushes and weeds. No
longer the clear refuge John Clarke had known, the
area became a sanctuary for marsh lovers instead:
alligators, ducks, dove quail, herons, owls, raccoons,
and remained so for almost 30 years.
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