In my previous blog post announcing my mother’s and my upcoming book,  A Pictorial History of Palm City, I told the story of Palm City’s very interesting early homesteader, Alligator Smith. Today I will share another tidbit – how Palm City’s creation is connected to Smith, and how his 1891 “state of intoxication and drowning” in the St. Luice River inadvertently led to C.C. Chillingworth becoming the known founding father of Palm City Farms in 1911.

In 1891 C.C. Chillingworth was a young lawyer at Robbins and Graham soon to be working in Juno, the county seat of Dade County.

Chillingworth’s second case was civil in the United States Land Office. In those days thousands of acres of land were open for homestead-entry but one had to reside on the land for two years. It was Chillingworth’s  job to prove that William M. Smith, locally known along the St. Luice as “Alligator Smith,” had “not abandoned” his 160 acre homestead, on the west side of the river.  By law, a six month abandonment caused the homestead to revert back to the federal government.

Chillingworth’s autobiography written in his later years states:

“We were engaged about a week in taking testimony at Pottsdam, now known as Stuart and I had been unable to prove that Smith had been spending any time on the homestead during six months. Smith was drunk and fell overboard from a boat in the St. Lucie River on July 4, 1891. However when I began to check on the testimony and prepare a brief for the Register of the U.S. Land Office at Gainesville, Florida, I discovered that Smith had died just one day less than six months after he made entry.”

Smith seemed to have lost his homestead by one day!

The case was appealed to the General Land Office in Wahington D.C. and  to the Secretary of the Interior, but in the end Chillingworth prevailed. According to my mother, the Bureau of Land Management documented that a Mr. George Mulligan ended up with Alligator Smith’s former homestead. How, we will never know!

These “coveted and valuable lands” located on the west side of the South Fork of the St. Lucie River are connected to today’s Palm City Farms developed in 1911 by none other that C. C. Chillingworth. Chillingworth’s familiarly with the lands of Alligator Smith inspired Chillingworth to develop Palm City Farms twenty years later. Without Alligator Smith, there would be no Palm City. I think we can say, Alligator Smith is Palm City’s real founding father!