The White City Story

Years ago, I remember taking my mother Mary to a very old antique store in a town called White City, located on the edge of Fort Pierce, not too far from her condo in Stuart, Florida. As I recall, we went into that store and browsed a fascinating collection of antiques, making for a very pleasant afternoon. And yesterday, just for fun, my sister Susan and I decided to see if that place was still there. And it is, although I must admit White City Mercantile, seen in the photograph on the left, does seem to need a little bit of paint and some additional tender loving care before the snowbirds come back to Florida next season.

However, the place is still filled with antiques, spilling out of the door and onto the porch, as seen in the photo on the right. And after visiting White City Mercantile, we drove around the town and found the place filled with a lot of old houses, many no more than tiny 19th century cottages. I looked the place up on the internet when I got home and found that White City was founded by Danish settlers, who attended the 1893 World's Fair and wanted to recreate Daniel Burnham's Great White City, the fair's main attraction.

Those Danish settlers founded White City in 1893, and it quickly became a prosperous agricultural community. However, the following year, a fellow named Colonel Myers arrived in town and set up a land scheme. He took down payments for land parcels and collected savings from residents to deposit in a future bank and then disappeared. That and the big freeze of 1894-95, which wiped out the farmers and growers, resulted in most of the original settlers leaving. However, the White City Improvement Club was established to restore the town's reputation and attract new settlers to the area. And it seems to have worked. In in addition to the small, original cottages located just down the street from White City Mercantile, across Midway Road (named for the Midway at the 1893 World's Fair), there are many 1900s era homes still in the area, such as the one in the photograph on the left.

Many of the streets in the area are really quite beautiful, populated with what looks like live oaks, with Spanish moss hanging from them, as seen in the photograph on the right. And in addition to those older homes, there is a lot of new housing in the community, just to the south, many of them pretty upscale. What is surprising is that the article I read on the internet is titled "Discover the Haunting History of White City," and states that "White City is a ghost town in Saint Lucie County, Florida, founded around 1893." If it is indeed a ghost town, who the hell is living in all those McMansions there? It almost makes you wonder if everything you read on the internet is indeed true.