Talk:Florida land boom of the 1920s

Use of the word "sham"
Regarding the sentence containing:

"... scrutinize the Florida real estate boom as a giant sham operation ..."

Considering that Wiktionary lists this word as "Probably a dialectal form of shame." is it the right word to use in this Wikipedia article?

--Mortense (talk) 17:13, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Miami land boom of the 1920s
This article (and its sources) are almost all exclusively focused on Miami and its developmental history in the 1920s. Therefore, I propose we change the title of this article to "Miami land boom of the 1920s." Thoughts?

--Comayagua99 (talk) 00:27, 3 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Although it is true that perhaps 80% of the boom was in Miami, there was booming going on elsewhere in Florida. The development of Boca Raton by Mizner and Davis Islands (Tampa) are good examples. Also, the boom was mentioned in many magazines and newspapers at the time. It was always referred to as the Florida Boom, never as the Miami Boom. Therefore, it would not be a good idea to change the title of this article. GroveGuy (talk) 04:59, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Marx Brothers
Their first movie “The Coconuts”(1929) satirizes the whole Florida land boom. Worth a mention?2601:647:5800:DD0:B87D:75DD:5E64:A5D4 (talk) 23:29, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Thoughts missing from this article
There is no mention of the connection between the 1925 (or 1926) collapse of the Florida Land Boom, and the Great Depression (which began in 1929). The Great Depression was part of the reason that it took Florida so long to recover. A Florida state agency (not mentioned) was involved in the effort to keep the counties afloat between the collapse of the land boom, and when the economy generally recovered (both locally and nationally). That agency was/is The Internal Improvement Trust Fund of the State of Florida (sometimes referred to by the acronym TIITF). TIITF was used by the state, to go purchase all the unsold property tax certificates. TIITF ended up (via the certificate purchases and then the tax deed auctions) owning a large percentage of the land in the State of Florida. Anecdotally, it may have been as high as 1/3 of the state. As the Great Depression eased, TIITF began selling off (some of) the acquired lands. Without TIITF buying those tax certificates, the counties would not have had operating funds during the depression.

The other interesting thought has to do with the mention in the article about the railroad gridlock. Prior to that occurring, there was a considerable use of the railroads for moving un-milled timber, from the area where it was cut to sawmills close to the ports (e.g. from the Florida Nature Coast to the mill in Jacksonville). About the time the railroads decided to halt moving certain materials, the companies doing the harvesting got hit with increased tariffs on moving raw logs. So they responded by building large mills in the same area where the timber was being harvested, then moving the milled final products to the ports via railroad. One example of this is Putnam Lumber Company of Shamrock FL. In 1928 they opened two very large mills, one for tidewater red cypress and one for longleaf yellow pine. This was explicitly done in response to the actions by the railroads. There is an article in a 1928 edition of the American Lumberman, that describes the situation about the railroads and (in particular) Putnam Lumber. Cosmicray (talk) 22:50, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

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