The Unsettling Story of Four Million Acres of Florida: Hamilton Disston

In 1881 a Philadelphia saw manufacturer named Hamilton Disston signed a single contract for four million acres of Florida, a tract larger than the state of Connecticut, and in the same stroke cleared a New York creditor's lawsuit that had frozen every land sale the state could make. He set out to drain the Everglades, lower a lake, and raise an empire of towns on the reclaimed bottom of it. Fifteen years later the water had come back. This is the story of the Vose injunction that padlocked an entire state's finances and the one-million-dollar check that dissolved it; the steam dredge that cut more than eighty miles of canal and drew Lake Okeechobee down about four and a half feet; the towns raised on the drained muck at Kissimmee, St. Cloud, Tarpon Springs, and Disston City, today Gulfport; the granulated sugar that actually grew on a former lake bed until a repealed federal bounty and the freezes of 1894 and 1895 killed it; the railroad city Disston refused to sell that a rival turned into St. Petersburg; and the Panic of 1893 and the mounting debt that took the fortune. It ends on a disputed morning in Philadelphia, a coroner's verdict of heart failure that one newspaper refused to believe, a foreclosed empire, and the Everglades the state is now spending billions of dollars to put back. What the New York Times called the largest land purchase ever made by a single person had drowned, quietly, in the very water it was dug to remove. #History #AmericanHistory #FloridaHistory #Everglades #HamiltonDisston #LakeOkeechobee #Documentary Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.