LIVING HISTORY
father had a large farm in Illinois,
but he wanted to escape the cold,”
Minton explains. “My grandparents,
Julia Eldred Thomas and Hal Thomas
had just gotten married when
Julia’s father, Elon, summoned them
to Florida. What a culture shock for
them. They left a large farm to come
to the wilds of Florida.”
Minton owns the family home,
built in 1893, named Eldred House.
On a wall in the home is a framed
copy of a deed dated 1890 giving the
county, which was then Brevard, 13
½ acres to build Indian River Drive.
“My family had people from Nassau,
Bahamas, here to tend the pineapple
plantation and pick the fruit when it
was ripe,” Minton says. “They lived
in back of the family home.”
PINEAPPLE CAPITAL
Farther south, Denmark native
John Laurence Jensen arrived from
West Virginia in 1881 and began
clearing the land for pineapples in
the community that would later
bear his name, Jensen Beach. With
the extension of the railroad, which
could carry the crop quickly to the
15
FLORIDA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION
Once Henry Flagler’s railroad arrived in Fort Pierce in 1894, farmers moved their packinghouses close to
the rail line. This packinghouse was owned by Charles T. McCarty of Fort Pierce.
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