100 years on…

Indian River County celebrates a century

BY JANIE GOULD

Indian River County was created on May 30, 1925 — nearly 100 years ago — when Gov. John D. Martin signed a bill that split St. Lucie County into two parts. The northern section becoming the state’s 65th county.

The “divisionists” who battled for the new county’s creation saw Vero as a neglected stepchild that failed to get its fair share of funding from the St Lucie County Commission. Four of the five commissioners lived in Fort Pierce, while only one hailed from Vero. 

A few years earlier, the commission had rejected Vero’s plea for a tax district that would have paid for a network of drainage canals. By all accounts, the area had been mostly swamp — unfit for agriculture and most human habitation — until 1914, when a private company, Indian River Farms, bought, drained, and eventually subdivided and sold nearly 50,000 acres. The price: 50 cents an acre. Vero leader A.W. Young met with hostility in Fort Pierce when he asked the commission for tax support to continue drainage work. He contacted a friend, the weekly Palm Beach Post publisher “Big Joe” Earman of West Palm Beach, who took the matter to the governor, Sidney J. Catts. The governor suspended and replaced the four commissioners from Fort Pierce, and when the issue again came to a vote, the Indian River Farms Drainage District was born. Then, the new commissioners resigned, and Catts reinstated the four from Fort Pierce, apologizing “for any inconvenience he may have caused them.”