The modern city begins with a trading post. In 1893 Frank Stranahan arrived at the New River, ran a ferry across it, and opened a trading post that did business with the Seminole and served as post office and community hall for the handful of settlers nearby. When the Florida East Coast Railway reached the river in 1896, the settlement had a future. In 1901 Stranahan built the house that still stands on the river at Las Olas — the Stranahan House, the oldest surviving building in Broward County. His wife, Ivy Cromartie Stranahan, had become the area's first schoolteacher in 1899 and spent her long life as an advocate for the Seminole; she is remembered as the “Mother of Fort Lauderdale.”
Long before the forts, the New River belonged to the Tequesta, who lived along its banks for more than a thousand years before European contact; by 1763, after generations of disease introduced by the Spanish, only a few remained. In the early nineteenth century the Seminole lived and farmed in the region, and it was to seize that ground, during a war of removal, that the army built the New River forts in 1838. The conflict and the forts passed, but the river stayed — a dark, winding tidal channel running out of the Everglades to the sea, the feature around which everything here would eventually be built.
Why People Visit Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale offers South Florida at its most nautical — a real beach city laced with canals, with a historic river downtown, a great cruise port, and the yachting world's calendar built around it. Visitors come for the water, the beaches, and the Venice-of-America canals, and stay for Las Olas, the Riverwalk, and the easy coastal pace. From the New River to the sand, it rewards a day or a week. It is bright, nautical, and genuinely South Florida.
