50 Fun Facts About Biscayne National Park

Biscayne National Park is in which US state?

Florida. The park, at the top of the Keys, was created in 1968 after plans to link its wild islands by causeway and line them with hotels set off a conservation backlash.

Roughly what share of Biscayne National Park, mostly bay and ocean, is dry land?

About 5 percent. The park was drawn to protect a bay and the sea beyond its islands, so the islands and the mainland fringe come to only some 9,000 of its 173,000 acres.

What did Israel Jones, a farmer on Biscayne's Porgy Key, name the elder brother of his son Sir Lancelot?

King Arthur. King Arthur Lafayette Jones was born in 1897 and Sir Lancelot Garfield Jones the next year; the brothers ran the family groves, then spent decades as fishing guides to the rich and powerful.

Whose Overseas Railroad, finished in 1912, bypassed Biscayne's keys and left them without a road or rail link?

Henry Flagler. His line left the mainland south of Elliott Key, so the islands above it stayed roadless and wild while the rest of the chain opened up to tourists.

Which venomous Indo-Pacific fish, an invader with few natural predators, has spread through Biscayne's waters since about 2010?

Lionfish. A popular story blames home aquariums smashed by a 1992 hurricane, but one was caught off the coast as early as 1985; pets dumped by their owners are the likelier origin.

Besides farming and salvaging wrecks, what did Elliott Key's pioneers gather from Biscayne Bay's shallows to sell?

Sponges. Lancelot Jones, the last of the old settlers, was still gathering and selling them in the 1980s, and gave visiting schoolchildren sponge talks into his nineties.

Which people, who lived by fishing rather than farming, held the shores of Biscayne Bay when Spanish explorers arrived?

The Tequesta. The sea fed them so well that they never took up farming, but diseases brought by Europeans had all but wiped them out by the mid-1700s, before the Seminole moved in.

The name Biscayne is often traced to a shipwrecked sailor from which region of Spain?

The Basque Country. Biscay is a Basque province, and an early Spanish account tells of a castaway from there, 'the Viscayno', who lived on this coast; a rival theory credits the Bay of Biscay itself.

Which port grew rich on wrecks from reefs like Biscayne's?

Key West. Until an 1825 law made wreckers land their salvage at a US port, much of it had been carried abroad for sale; the crews then settled in the Keys, and salvage made the town rich.

Which Royal Navy warship, lost in the park in 1748, gave its name to the rocks where Biscayne's offshore lighthouse stands?

HMS Fowey. The rocks carry its name, yet the wreck that archaeologists identified as the ship lies some way to the south, in Legare Anchorage.

What kind of trail is Biscayne National Park's Maritime Heritage Trail?

An underwater shipwreck trail. Snorkelers and divers follow it between six wrecks; one, a steamer, ran aground in 1878 a few hundred yards from the men building the lighthouse meant to warn ships away.

Two legendary pirates said to have hidden out on Biscayne's Elliott Key shared which name?

Black Caesar. Both are said to have slipped away from pursuers through the creek south of Elliott Key that still carries the name, though no record from their day confirms the tales.

Which future Confederate general surveyed Biscayne Bay in 1849 to judge where forts might be built?

Robert E. Lee. Then an Army engineer, he toured the coast on the orders of General Joseph Totten, the chief of engineers whose name one of the park's keys still bears.

Which former US vice president, beaten by Lincoln in 1860, spent two nights in Biscayne Bay while fleeing to Cuba in 1865?

John C. Breckinridge. Buchanan's vice president, by 1865 the Confederate secretary of war, slipped down the coast in a small boat with a handful of companions and reached Cuba four days later.

Israel Lafayette Jones, a Black farmer who settled in Biscayne's southern islands in 1897, became a leading grower of which crops?

Key limes and pineapples. He paid $300 for his first island, cleared it by hand, and later sold land he had bought for a dollar an acre for $250,000.

What did Lancelot Jones keep when he sold his Biscayne islands to the Park Service?

A life estate on three acres. The first islander to sell, he took about a third of what developers might have paid rather than see the keys built over, and lived on there until a 1992 hurricane.

Which developer built the Cocolobo Cay Club, a retreat for the rich on Biscayne's Adams Key?

Carl G. Fisher. The promoter who turned a mangrove sandbar into Miami Beach took tycoons and politicians fishing from the club, until the 1929 crash wiped out his fortune.

Which former president fished Biscayne's waters with the Jones brothers?

Herbert Hoover. By Lancelot Jones's account he came to fish between November and April for over seven years in the 1940s; the brothers also guided several senators who later reached the White House.

Nixon fired Park Service chief George Hartzog in 1972 after his friend Bebe Rebozo clashed with Biscayne staff over what?

Docking his boat. Accounts differ on whether rangers ticketed him or cancelled his permit to tie up at a Park Service dock; Nixon replaced Hartzog with the aide who had run his travel arrangements.

Which agency ran secret commando training and infiltration missions from Biscayne's Elliott Key in the early 1960s?

The CIA. It trained Cuban exiles there in the Bay of Pigs era, using a hidden dock and a safe house, and as late as 1988 exiles were arrested staging a mock invasion on the key.

During Prohibition, rumrunners hid among Biscayne's keys while waiting to land liquor brought from which nearby islands?

The Bahamas. A fast boat could cross from Bimini in a few hours, so smugglers waited among the keys and their mangrove creeks for a clear run to the mainland.

What did Elliott Key's landowners name the city they incorporated around 1960 to push for development in Biscayne Bay?

Islandia. The paper city never had more than a handful of residents, most of them in later years park staff, and the county finally abolished it in 2012.

How did developers try to spoil Biscayne's Elliott Key as a site for a national monument?

Bulldozed a road down its middle. The six-lane swath earned the name Spite Highway, but the forest has closed back over it, and today it is the island's main hiking trail.

What was to be built at Seadade, the seaport a shipping billionaire planned for Biscayne Bay?

An oil refinery. Its tankers would have needed a deep channel dredged across the shallow bay and cut through the reef, and the fight to stop it grew into the campaign for a national park.

Which president signed the law creating Biscayne National Monument in October 1968?

Lyndon B. Johnson. Congress had been won over by a lobbying campaign that a vacuum-cleaner heir paid for, and Johnson signed the bill in his final months in office.

Which animal dug up nearly every sea turtle nest on Biscayne's keys in bad years, before rangers began screening them?

Raccoons. Rangers now walk the beaches early each morning to find fresh nests before the raccoons do, and lay mesh over them that is lifted in time for the hatchlings to leave.

Biscayne Bay was originally meant to be part of which other national park?

Everglades. Ernest Coe's first plan for that park took in the bay, its keys and Key Largo, but they were cut to win agreement on the smaller park that opened in 1947.

Which marine mammal is seen in Biscayne Bay's sheltered waters most often in the colder months?

Manatee. Unable to stand cold water, manatees move into warm, sheltered spots before winter's coldest months, and are sometimes seen grazing right beside the park's visitor center.

Which Spanish explorer sailed past Biscayne Bay in 1513 and named the keys Los Mártires, 'the Martyrs'?

Juan Ponce de León. Seen from the sea, the chain of low rocky islets is said to have looked to him like men in torment, so he named it for the martyrs.

Which 1992 hurricane crossed Biscayne National Park, wrecking most of Stiltsville and driving Lancelot Jones off Porgy Key?

Andrew. Its eye passed directly over the park; Jones, aged 93 and used to riding out storms at home, was lifted off just before it struck and never moved back.

Which Midwestern tycoon, his name on millions of household devices, built a mock lighthouse on his Biscayne island?

Mark C. Honeywell. The thermostat maker bought the island in 1937 and gave lavish parties there for the winter colony's rich, one of them complete with elephant rides.

Which island, known for its ornamental lighthouse, is the most visited in Biscayne National Park?

Boca Chita Key. Its 65-foot tower was built for show and never guided a ship, yet boaters steer for it all the same; the island has a campground but no fresh water or electricity.

Which newspaper's reporter Juanita Greene helped turn public opinion toward a Biscayne national park with her 1960s stories?

The Miami Herald. Greene's stories helped a small, vocal band of park supporters win over local politicians, in a fight so bitter that one supporter said opponents had poisoned his dog.

Which power station, with its cooling canals, adjoins Biscayne National Park's southwestern boundary?

Turkey Point. Its miles of warm cooling canals turned out to be a near-ideal nursery for the American crocodile, and many of the park's crocodiles hatch there.

Why can American crocodiles live along Biscayne Bay's shore, where alligators are scarce?

They tolerate saltier estuarine water: crocodiles have glands on the tongue that shed salt, while alligators keep mostly to the fresh water farther inland.

Which endangered butterfly of Biscayne's Elliott Key was down to five individuals in a 2012 survey?

Schaus' swallowtail. The count, down from 41 a year earlier, brought an emergency order to capture a few females and rear their eggs in a university laboratory.

Which sea turtle accounts for nearly all the nests on Biscayne National Park's beaches?

Loggerhead. Named for its outsized head, it is the park's commonest turtle; bright lights are its hatchlings' enemy, luring them toward roads when they should be heading for the sea.

Which prized furniture wood grows wild in the forests of Biscayne's keys?

Mahogany. Early visitors prized the keys' hardwood forests for it, but later settlers saw only worthless scrub and burned much of the forest off to clear fields.

Boats that run aground in Biscayne's shallows leave scars that last for years in beds of what?

Seagrass. Propellers cut and uproot the plants, stripping food and hiding places from a bay that serves as a nursery for young fish and other sea life.

Elliott Key and its neighbours in Biscayne are built of Key Largo Limestone, the fossil remains of what?

An ancient coral reef. It grew about 100,000 years ago, when the sea stood higher; when the water dropped, the coral died in the open air and hardened into the rock of the keys.

Which tree of Biscayne's island forests is nicknamed the 'tourist tree' for its red, peeling bark?

Gumbo limbo. The joke is that it looks like a sunburnt visitor; its wood is soft enough to have been carved into carousel horses, yet few trees stand up to hurricane winds as well.

Which shy bird, sought by birders along the wooded shore at Biscayne's Convoy Point, is far more often heard than seen?

Mangrove cuckoo. It keeps to dense mangrove tangles, where a throaty call is often the only sign of it, so birders put up with heat and mosquitoes for hours in the hope of a glimpse.

Which holiday weekend, when a famous regatta draws partying boaters to Elliott Key, have Biscayne rangers called the most dangerous?

Columbus Day. The regatta itself is sailed outside the park, but thousands of revellers then gather off Elliott Key; six people died in boating accidents there in the ten years to 2012.

Each July a two-day sport season sends divers into Biscayne's waters after which shellfish?

Spiny lobster. The 'mini-season' comes days before the regular season opens, yet the park's whole bay side stays off limits, a sanctuary where no lobster may be taken at any time of year.

Biscayne National Park's mainland visitor center is named after which congressman, who steered the bill creating the park?

Dante Fascell. The local congressman championed the 1968 bill, and the centre that bears his name stands where the county once ran a separate, segregated beach for Black bathers.

Legend says Stiltsville's first shack stood a mile out in Biscayne Bay in 1933 to make which activity legal?

Gambling. Whatever the truth of the tale, 'Crawfish' Eddie Walker's shack was known for bait, beer and crawfish chowder, and when police later raided a club on the flats they found no games at all.

Which picture magazine's 1941 feature on Stiltsville's Quarterdeck Club turned the offshore bar into a tourist draw?

Life. It pictured the club, built on a barge, as an oceanic heaven whose members commuted by speedboat; a 1950 hurricane and a 1961 fire that burned it to the pilings ended the party.

Which Air Force base beside Biscayne National Park was all but destroyed by the hurricane of August 1992?

Homestead. Most of its 2,000 buildings were wrecked and the base was recommended for closure, but it was rebuilt and reopened as a smaller Air Reserve base.

Whose fishing license do anglers need in Biscayne National Park's waters?

The state's. The act that created the park kept its waters open to fishing under state law, so a state license and state catch rules apply even inside a national park.

Which Dade County state attorney's office ruled in 1990 that every election in Biscayne's island city had been invalid?

Janet Reno. Her office found that only landowners, never ordinary residents, had been allowed to vote there; three years later she became the first woman to serve as US attorney general.