The Bel Lido neighborhood in 1963 before homes were built.
More local history stories: Centennial Celebrations!; Boynton Beach: City’s oldest house gets one more chance for a new life; Delray Beach: Cemetery may be fit for national historic recognition
By Rich Pollack
In the beginning, concerns about water and a possible trailer park led to the creation of Highland Beach.
Back in the late 1940s, what is now Highland Beach was just a sparsely populated unincorporated area of Palm Beach County relying on wells for drinking water.
When salt water invaded those wells, the handful of residents sought alternatives, including reaching out to adjacent towns Delray Beach and Boca Raton.
Turned down by both, a small group of residents agreed to build their own water treatment facility. To fund the project, they decided to appeal to state leaders in Tallahassee and begin the incorporation process.
By December 1949, the town of Highland Beach became official, with 21 residents signing on to what was known as “Highland Beach’s Declaration of Independence.”
This month — and for much of the next year — Highland Beach will celebrate its founding 75 years ago with events and a revisiting of the town’s unique history.
Over the past seven and a half decades the town has evolved, from a tiny enclave with just a few homes and apartments for vacationers, to a coastal beach community with a Florida Keys feel, and later to a thriving full-service community with towering high-rises and multimillion-dollar beachfront homes.
Highland Beach manages to maintain a small-town feel, though it is hard to imagine what some of the original founders would think of it today.
Although there is no official history of the town, information available in the Highland Beach Library, pieced together with excerpts from the book The Amazing Story of Highland Beach by Sandy Simon and combined with stories from longtime residents, offer a glimpse of the town’s past.
Among Highland Beach’s 20 or so founding fathers were five men who formed the first Town Commission: Mayor Robert Totterdale, Vice Mayor R.S. Weeks and Commissioners Rudolph Hertwig, H.H. Dubendortt and J. Morrison Smith.
Along with concerns about water quality, this handful of residents also worried that trailer parks — which were springing up nearby — could fill the area if zoning restrictions were not in place.
Within a short time after incorporation, the population had risen to about 125.
The name Highland Beach was selected by town leaders because the land rose 20 to 25 feet above the high tide line, which was higher than dune crests in other nearby beach communities.
In the town’s early years, State Road A1A ran atop the dune, a bit east of where it is now, and wildlife abounded. It was not uncommon to see foxes, even panthers and bobcats, wandering through what was a swampy wilderness.
Land in Highland Beach in the 1940s was going for about $45 a foot, including land on what is now the west side of A1A, which was considered less valuable because it was swamp and mangroves. By the 1950s land values had grown to $125 a foot.
Throughout the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, Highland Beach grew at a relatively modest pace. One of the first high-rise buildings in town was Highland Towers, which was built in 1958 and remains in place today.
Peggy Gossett-Seidman’s parents were early residents and enjoyed fishing.
Photos provided
“Back then, Highland Beach was a sleepy beach town undiscovered by just about everyone,” says longtime resident and now state Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, who came as a vacationer in the 1970s. “It was filled with natural wildlife and you could just disappear.”
Gossett-Seidman remembers A1A being barely paved and recalls an ocean plentiful with sea life.
“It was heaven, just a beach heaven,” she recalls.
By the late 1970s, Highland Beach began a development boom, with condo buildings springing up on either side of A1A.
The old Town Hall in 1975.
The town, which in the mid-1960s had just one employee, grew with its own police department and a functioning Town Hall that would later include a library inside the building and a post office of its own.
As construction continued, crews unearthed reminders of Highland Beach’s past, long before development began.
In the 1980s, workers discovered bones believed to belong to Native Americans who lived on the coast where they fished and lived off the land.
Then in 2003 a worker digging a trench for an underground pipe at the south end of town discovered 22 bones that turned out to be that of a woman and a child about 2 years old.
The bones were believed to be more than 1,000 years old and were part of a well-documented ancient graveyard where more than 170 skeletons were found years earlier.
The beach at the south end of town later became a favorite gathering place for members of the Yamato colony, which was founded by Japanese pineapple farmers. The area near the outcropping that is now known as Yamato Rock became known as a great place for beach parties attended by families and individuals.
Gossett-Seidman says she is pleased that the town has been able to keep its small-town feel over the years.
“Throughout its history, Highland Beach has remained a family-oriented beach town, even with all the changes,” she says. “It’s kept some of its humble beginning.”
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