I recently spent some quality time in a third-floor room at the public records office on Whitehead Street. The repository holds the documentation of every property deed ever drafted in Monroe County, sans what seems likely to have been a few that slipped through the Bubba cracks, were lost or destroyed by fire, hurricane, or silverfish.
The object of my desire was a needle in a haystack — a property transaction that may have occurred in 1945, 1946 or 1947. At least the property deeds from this period were generally typed, so there was only a little bit of the squinting and head-tilting that tends to occur when reading through 19th century handwritten documents.
The room is Spartan with concrete walls and beige, metal shelves lined with old albums. They are filled with the stiff pages of deeds and other official records. The pages are black and white, but it is the page that is black and the writing, typed or handwritten, that is white. The albums, worn with decades of use or disuse, are surprisingly heavy. Also, they have all been copied and are available to view on endless reels of microfilm.
The room has six small desk-sized cubicles, two wide and three deep. Four can be used to examine documents under a modicum of privacy. One desk cubicle houses a computer screen, and the cubicle next door is equipped with the necessary machinery required to project microfilm onto that computer screen.
Closer to the metal shelves holding the deed books are two small tables clearly designed for those shorter legs encountered in grade school classrooms. I prefer to flip through the pages rather than navigate the cumbersome microfilm and start with the physical copies of the deed books, pulling one tired album after another from the shelf and setting them on the child-sized table. Flipping through the pages, scanning each for the hint of a name or location that could be linked to the property in question is an eyeball-blurring experience, especially for someone who eclipsed the half-century mark more than a handful of years ago.
People stream in and out with questions about legal documents in the other room. It is impossible not to listen. At one point, I hear a man with a deep, clear voice say, “I’m looking for a copy of my divorce papers.”
“Okay,” the employee says. “What year was your divorce?
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” the employee says. “What was your wife’s name?
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your wife’s name?”
“No.”
My head cocked toward the open door connecting the two rooms. If I’m not careful, I might miss the document I came here to find.
Having looked at each and every Monroe County property deed from 1945 and 1946, a couple of things became apparent. First, an inordinately large number of transactions were for “$10 and other good and valuable considerations.”
I do come across two significant properties that sold for a great deal more than $10. First, there is the property deed from what will become known as North Key Largo’s Ocean Reef, referred to in the deed as the Ocean Reef Camp. The Tropical Isles Club, Inc. owned the property, whose trustees were N.W. Jeran, D.K. Miller, and Glen C. Mincer. On September 25, 1945, they sold the approximately 113-acre property to Seaboard Properties, Inc. of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The purchase price of $20,000 included a galley and dining room, main cottage, two cabins, a toolbox, skiffs, and one Nassau sailing dinghy.
The second significant sale was detailed in a Warranty Deed dated March 14, 1946. Taver and Eloise Bayly sold to Berlin and Mary Eloise Felton Lot 1, Square 5 for $30,000. The property is described as “…commencing at a point 129 feet from the corner of Front and Simonton streets, and running thence in a Northeasterly direction 273 feet to the waters and harbor of Key West; thence along the waters of said island in a Southeasterly direction 216 feet; thence in a Southwesterly direction 328 feet; thence in a Northwesterly direction 108 feet; thence at right angles in a Northeasterly direction 55 feet; thence at right angles in a Northwesterly direction 108 feet to the point of beginning.”
The A & B Lobster House sits on that waterfront property today. The “A” in A & B stands for Alonzo Cothron, and the “B” Berlin Felton.
After two trips to Key West and hours of sitting at that child’s desk peering at page after page of documents, I was about to give up any hope of finding the record I was searching for when, lo and behold, the needle in that haystack finally revealed itself.
