Our West Palm Beach logo carries the Florida alligator over “Florida Territory · Est. 1845,” the year Florida became a state — the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida town. Printed in clean retro black-and-white that reads like an old crate label or woodcut, the alligator stands for Florida as a whole; what makes this one West Palm Beach is everything behind it — Flagler’s railroad, the plant-named streets, the Intracoastal and the island across it, and a working mainland city that grew up proud beside the glamour.
The town came together fast. Flagler’s surveyor platted forty-eight blocks between Clear Lake and the Lake Worth Lagoon, the railroad reached the new settlement in the spring of 1894, and on November 5 that year seventy-eight residents crowded into the “Calaboose” — the little wooden jailhouse — and voted 77 to 1 to incorporate. That made West Palm Beach the oldest incorporated municipality in South Florida, on the books two full years before Miami. One early resident remembered it as nothing but white sand, two steel rails, a few acres of pineapples, and scrub on every side. From that, a city.
Why People Visit West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach rewards visitors who want culture with their coastline: a serious arts scene, a lively downtown, historic neighborhoods under the palms, and the Intracoastal at the center of it all. Add the island just across the water and the year-round South Florida sun, and Flagler’s mainland city makes an easy case for itself.
