Research Questions:
1) “Who” built Miami FL? Beginning c.1890 Julia Tuttle, William Brickell, and Henry Flagler provided a
means for creating a new settlement on the southern end of Florida – Miami. Although they had the
resources to create a new ‘city,’ they themselves did not do the work necessary to build the city. In
the years immediately preceding the incorporation of Miami hundreds of people arrived in the area to
begin the building process. Who were the people who came to this wilderness to literally cut out and
build a city where none existed? From what parts of the United States did the workers come? From where
did workers originally outside the U.S. come? What were their motivations?
2) What other reasons/motivations were there for people coming the Miami between 1890 and 1920?
Resources I have stumbled across:
A journal article: “Bahamian Labor Migration to Florida in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-
Centuries” from The International Migration Review Spring, 1988 written by Howard Johnson, professor
at The College of the Bahamas.
A website: “Florida Migration History, 1850-2018 – https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Florida.
shtml#:~:text=Migration%20to%20Florida%20is%20an%20old%20story%2C%20In,the%201920s%2C%20attracting
%20northerners%20as%20well%20as%20southerners, compiled by James Gregory of the University of
Washington
These sources will provide the foundation of why people began to migrate to the Miami, Florida region
beginning in the 1890s. From these sources I hope to find more information that will explain what jobs
were needed to build Miami, what types of people came to Miami to fill these jobs, and what was the
motivation that made them leave their homes and move to Miami. The sources are more academic in nature
but do provide some data that can be used to search for and illustrate “who built Miami.”
