An Interesting Story Involving A Very Uninteresting Town

Driving back to Stuart, Florida from points south on Interstate 95, the overhead signs where we exit the freeway indicate turning right to reach Stuart and left to reach Indiantown. Each time we passed it, Susan would pepper me with questions about Indiantown, and I just would reply that it was a small, boring town in the middle of nowhere. But also, where I once took a photograph of her and our mother Mary (as seen on the left) in front of the Seminole Inn, a hotel that was built in 1926. Eventually, I decided to drive the 20 miles to Indiantown to give her a look at the place. There were some old 1920s era homes scattered around town, but the only notable structure was the Seminole Inn, which was still operating 30 years or so after I took that photograph.

I took the self-portrait on the right at the same spot where I had taken that earlier photograph. The first thing I noticed is that all the beautiful flowers are now gone. Due to climate change or no longer being able to afford a gardener I don't know. In any case, just for fun, I looked up the Seminole Inn on the internet when I got home and found that Indiantown began as a Seminole trading post, later being settled by white American migrants in the 1890s. In 1924, a man named S. Davies Warfield built an extension of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad from Coleman, Florida (located to the northwest of Orlando) to West Palm Beach, with a stop in Indiantown. Warfield planned to make Indiantown Seaboard's southern headquarters and build a model city. That was when he built the Seminole Inn. He required that the hotel be finished in time for the start of the season in January of 1926. Why there would be a season in that town is beyond me, but the Inn was finished on time and opened with a big "Gala Event," and the Social Hostess for the event was Warfield's niece, Wallis Warfield.

At the time, Wallis was married to a hard drinking and abusive naval lieutenant whom she divorced in 1927, and the following year married an American businessman named Earnest Aldrich Simpson, who resided in London. Which is where she met Edward VIII, then the Price of Wales. In 1936 Edward became king, and wanted to marry Wallis, who was in the process of divorcing Simpson. Edward was forced to abdicate in order to marry Wallis, and Edward became the Duke of Windsor. Of course, that couple created a lot of headlines over the years, from the havoc their proposed marriage caused the British Monarchy to their pro-Nazi sympathies to their life in France after the war. But I am just amazed that someone hosting a gala in Indiantown back in 1926 would eventually become the wife of the Duke of Windsor. As for Indiantown, the Florida land boom ended after 1926, S. Davies Warfield died the following year, ending plans to make Indiantown Seaboard's southern headquarters, and the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane caused major damage and ended any further development. But the truly amazing thing is that I look no older now than I did when my mother took that photograph on the left of Susan and me all those 30 years ago. Definitely a Dorian Gray moment. I need to check that portrait of me in the closet when I get back to Denver.