VIEWS FROM THE VILLAGE

BY JANIE GOULD
PHOTOS BY ED DRONDOSKI

Motorists heading east on Chamberlin Boulevard, the main street of St. Lucie Village, can sense the presence of two worlds as they gaze across the Indian River lagoon: One is new Florida as seen in the high-rises that line the eastern horizon from North Hutchinson Island.

But on the west side of the river, the historic St. Lucie Village stands as a remnant of old Florida, a place where some families have resided for a century or more, where roads are purposely kept narrow, code enforcement is casual, and there hasn’t been a contested election for mayor or village aldermen in years.

“It’s the oldest continuously occupied area in St. Lucie County,” said Lucille Rights, a historian, former resident of St. Lucie Village and author of A Portrait of St. Lucie County, Florida. “I lived where Indians lived at least 2,000 years ago.”

St. Lucie Village, with 460 acres and a population of about 600, is mostly residential, with some business and industry along Old Dixie Highway and U.S. 1. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 and it has nearly three dozen structures. The village is about 4 miles north of Fort Pierce and 11 miles south of Vero Beach.

The community’s founding dates back to 1849, when a Seminole attack prompted the U. S. government to build Fort Capron to protect skittish settlers. But the area had been inhabited for centuries, in part because of its proximity to the Indian River Inlet, a natural inlet now closed north of the current Fort Pierce Inlet. Sixteenth century Spanish explorer Pedro Menendez, who founded St. Augustine, came in through the inlet while sailing to Cuba and saw an Ais Indian settlement, Rights said.

EARLIEST SETTLERS
An officer who had served at Fort Capron, Maj. James E. Paine, became one of the first white settlers and gave St. Lucie its name. Another pioneer was William Russell, who was injured in the Seminole attack, and whose homestead still stands. The Russell-Padrick House, built between 1870 and 1875, is the oldest structure in the county.

Edward Cabell Summerlin arrived in 1887 to grow pineapples and take green turtles, oysters and fish from the river, his granddaughter, Polly Summerlin Moore, said. The community’s first school was in the Summerlin home, she said.

“It was open country here,” said Moore, who has lived in the village most of her life. “My grandfather bought land from the Paynes and Joneses, who were already living here.” Besides the Summerlins and the descendants of Judge Minor S. Jones, other St. Lucie Village families that go back a century or more include the Hoskinses, Peeds and Koblegards.

One name associated with early St. Lucie is Matthew Quay, a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who wintered here, starting in the 1870s. A neighboring three-story cottage was built by cronies of Quay as a hunting, fishing and gambling retreat. The structure has been restored and is a major attraction in the historic district.

Matthew Quay earned gratitude for getting a $15,000 appropriation to deepen the channel of the Indian River. A town in Indian River County was named for him, but changed to Winter Beach in the 1920s. History has not been kind to Quay. In the book “Pennsylvania Politics: Today and Yesterday,” author Paul Beers called him the “ultimate schemer and spoilsman.” His name survives at Quay Dock Road in Winter Beach.

BEACH BOULEVARD
One of the most distinctive areas of St. Lucie Village is the great east-west thoroughfare known as Chamberlin Boulevard, named for Mrs. Hattie Chamberlin of Kansas City, Mo., who during the land boom of the 1920s platted a subdivision and planted the distinctive Washingtonia palms in the median.

The boulevard was the grand entrance to a bridge that was being built to North Hutchinson Island. Part of the bridge had been built but the hurricane of 1928 destroyed it. “This place would have been like a fish camp if that happened,’’ said longtime
resident Dr. Paul Hoskins.

St. Lucie Village remained unincorporated until the early 1960s, when the St. Lucie County Commission approved two industrial rezonings for the village. One would have allowed a sand-mining operation, while the other was for a U.S. Steel manufacturing plant.

“We fought it, but the commission wouldn’t back down,” resident Robert Terry Jr. said.

Village residents decided to incorporate, but approval of at least two-thirds of all registered voters was needed. They had neighborhood meetings to get the word out, and even though it was spring and many seasonal residents had left, the referendum passed.

FIERCE INDEPENDENCE
Bill Thiess, an engineer who heads the Fort Pierce Utilities Authority, has served as the mayor of St. Lucie Village for nearly two decades. He and the village aldermen are unpaid. The village has three part-time employees: a building official, clerk and marshal, plus an attorney on call.

Village residents are like Montana freemen, Thiess said. “They want to get government off their backs.”

“We don’t do much code enforcement,” he said. “If someone complains, we do respond. It’s the only place in the county where there’s no leash law. There’s no open container law.”

The 10-foot-wide roads in the riverfront area are the same as they were in horse-and-buggy days. Cars don’t have enough room to pass each other, but if the village were to try to widen those streets, “residents would go ballistic,” Thiess said.

And even though St. Lucie Village is the most historic community in the county, it doesn’t have a historic preservation ordinance, though the matter is coming up for discussion. If the village does enact something, it wouldn’t be nearly as restrictive as those of Fort Pierce or the county, Thiess said.

“It’s just not going to happen that we would dictate what people could do with their land,” he said. “We don’t want to have people coming around measuring our grass and telling us when to mow. It’s a whole different outlook.”

When a board was organized to oversee St. Lucie Village’s community center, the charter stated that three members must come from St. Lucie Village and two from St. Lucie County, but that nobody from Port St. Lucie would be eligible.

Historian Anne Sinnott, a village resident, said her mother-in-law, Beth Sinnott, used to call the community “God’s country.”

“People respect each other’s privacy here, but you don’t ever pass someone without waving,” she said.

And Terry said, “It’s always been a special place. The river is part of your life here. There’s no road between us and the river.”