Professional Carpet Cleaning Miami Florida & Surrounding Areas

The Tequesta Native American tribe occupied the Miami area for around 2,000 years before contact with Europeans. A village of hundreds of people, dating to 500–600 B.C., was located at the mouth of the Miami River. It is believed that the entire tribe migrated to Cuba by the mid-1700s.

In 1566, admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Florida’s first governor, claimed the area for Spain. A Spanish mission was constructed one year later. Spain and Britain successively ruled Florida until Spain ceded it to the United States in 1821. In 1836, the U.S. built Fort Dallas on the banks of the Miami River as part of its development of the Florida Territory and its attempt to suppress and remove the Seminoles. As a result, the Miami area became a site of fighting in the Second Seminole War.

Miami is noted as the only major city in the United States founded by a woman. Julia Tuttle, a local citrus grower and a wealthy Cleveland native, was the original owner of the land upon which the city was built. In the late 19th century, the area was known as “Biscayne Bay Country”, and reports described it as a promising wilderness and “one of the finest building sites in Florida”. The Great Freeze of 1894–95 hastened Miami’s growth, as the crops there were the only ones in Florida that survived. Julia Tuttle subsequently convinced railroad tycoon Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to the region, for which she became known as “the mother of Miami”. Miami was officially incorporated as a city on July 28, 1896, with a population of just over 300. It was named for the Miami River, derived from Mayaimi, the historic name of Lake Okeechobee and the Native Americans that lived around it.

African American labor played a crucial role in Miami’s early development. During the early 20th century, migrants from the Bahamas and African-Americans constituted 40 percent of the city’s population.:25 Despite their role in the city’s growth, their community was limited to a small space. When landlords began to rent homes to African-Americans around Avenue J (what would later become NW Fifth Avenue), a gang of white men with torches marched through the neighborhood and warned the residents to move or be bombed.:33

Miami prospered during the 1920s with an increase in population and infrastructure as northerners moved to the city. The legacy of Jim Crow was embedded in these developments. Miami’s chief of police at the time, H. Leslie Quigg, did not hide the fact that he, like many other white Miami police officers, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Unsurprisingly, these officers enforced social codes far beyond the written law. Quigg, for example, “personally and publicly beat a colored bellboy to death for speaking directly to a white woman”.:53