HOME & DESIGN
LIVING HISTORY
ROB DOWNEY
Knight Kiplinger, who heads the Kiplinger financial media company, continues
to uphold his family’s generous business model and philanthropic
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lumber business near “the mouth of the Santa Lucia.” So,
according to dusty case law, the Spanish governor of Florida
gifted Miles a grant of 5 square miles. That vast tract of land
included 10 acres where Bay Tree Lodge would be built some
96 years later.
Miles never did build his saw mill, and so the trees remained.
Not long after Florida became a U.S. territory, the
Spanish land grant became tangled up in title litigation for
many years. John M. Hanson and other purchasers of Samuel
Miles’ property were forced to take their ownership issues all
the way to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. In 1842,
America’s most powerful justices untied most of the legal
knots. Hanson and his heirs won recognition of a handsome
share of Miles’ original land, which was thereafter called the
Hanson Grant, or sometimes the Miles-Hanson Grant.
Toward the end of the 1800s, the Hanson Grant came into
the possession of a middle-aged former merchant marine
named Henry Sewall. Although Sewall’s holdings included
thousands of acres on the mainland side of the St. Lucie, he
chose to live near the point where the St. Lucie and Indian
rivers meet. In 1891, Sewall built a home overlooking the inlet.
He established a post office, too, which made the Sewall’s
Point name official, but the region was still a wilderness.
In 1894, Henry Flagler began to draw national attention
to his newly developed tropical resort in Palm Beach, some
35 miles south of Sewall’s Point by sea. That’s where the
Standard Oil tycoon built the largest wooden structure in
the world. It was a luxury hotel called the Royal Poinciana.
Wealthy snowbirds flocked to Flagler’s winter paradise via
Flagler’s new railway down the coast. And so began the >>
KIPLINGER COLLECTION
ties to the Treasure Coast.
The grounds of the resort were landscaped by one of Henry Flagler’s master gardeners, Edward L. Hosford, who remained as caretaker for 37 years.