NEIGHBORHOODS
ROB DOWNEY
Don and Jessica Armstrong recently moved back to Stuart and purchased
a home in St. Lucie Estates facing a row of 100-year-old mango trees that
Don climbed as a child. They are renovating the mid-20th century modern
home located in the heart of the subdivision.
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came to Stuart as children in 1925, the same year Martin
County and St. Lucie Estates were formed. His father, Donald
Armstrong Sr., moved here from Arkansas and that year
Don’s mother, Frances Armstrong, arrived with her uncle,
Edward Joseph Smith, who was raising her.
Smith came to Stuart to serve as Martin County’s first
county judge, appointed by Gov. John Martin. The Smiths
built two houses in St. Lucie Estates, and the one built in the
1920s still stands on 213 SE Alamanda Way.
After serving as an officer during World War II, Don Sr.
studied architecture at the University of Florida on the GI
Bill and returned to Stuart to establish Martin County’s main
architecture firm.
“Home for me was the house I grew up in during the 1950s
and 1960s,” my husband recalls, sitting in the living room of
our St. Lucie Estates house, whose picture windows overlook
the ancient mango trees he climbed as a child. “Our house sat
in a lush jungle of mango, guava, cherry, orange and other
fruit-bearing trees that grew wild on the property my father
purchased right after World War II.”
Their St. Lucie Estates homestead was part of a large nursery
established in the 1920s to supply trees and shrubs for the
newly formed St. Lucie Estates.
“That explained the straight rows of equally spaced mango
trees, and why everywhere I went I saw the same variety of
plants,” Don says. “And it explained the dilapidated caretaker’s
shack and old windmill that pumped water from the
ground to irrigate.”
When the first sections of St. Lucie Estates were developed
in 1925, this was the peak of Florida’s decade-long “land
boom.” St. Lucie Estates was created that same year to appeal >>
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