That town began as farmland. In 1903 the settlement counted eighteen people; by 1920, about a hundred, raising pineapples and vegetables in the sandy soil near the inlet. Boca Raton first incorporated in 1924 as 'Bocaratone,' then re-incorporated under its present name on May 26, 1925 — right at the peak of the great Florida land boom, when speculators were turning swamp and scrub into paper fortunes up and down the coast. Into that fevered moment stepped Addison Mizner, and everything changed almost overnight.
Boca Raton's modern story is stranger and more inventive than its resort glamour suggests. From 1942 to 1945 the Boca Raton Army Air Field was a top-secret base — the only place in the country that trained military radar operators, and a training ground for B-29 crews. After the war the airfield's land became Florida Atlantic University, founded in 1962, whose campus still traces the old runway lines. And on August 12, 1981, in an IBM facility in Boca Raton, a small team unveiled the IBM Personal Computer — the machine that launched the modern PC era. For a city built on a Mediterranean fantasy, Boca turned out to be a quietly serious place.
Why People Visit Boca Raton
Boca Raton rewards visitors who want South Florida with a century of style behind it — Addison Mizner's Mediterranean Revival architecture, a beautiful stretch of Atlantic beach, the arts and dining of Mizner Park, and a genuinely surprising history that runs from a secret WWII radar school to the birthplace of the personal computer. People come for the beaches and the resort glamour, for the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and for an easy, refined coastal day with deep roots.
