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A First-Class Speculative Investment -- Lands Having Advanced in price from 300 to 500 per cent within the past six months!

Fine promotional broadsheet map and promotional tract on the verso, encouraging investment in St. Andrews Bay and the area around the modern Panama City, Florida.

On the verso, an elegant row boat scene shows a happy group of well dressed young ladies in a row boat, include a guitar and flowers -- such enticements were the "Pleasures of St. Andrew's Bay."  The remainder of the verso is filled with testimonials from important regional newspapers, including the Baltimore Manufacturers' Record and the Cincinnati American Sportsman.

The work promotes the lands being sold by the St. Andrews Bay Railroad, Land, and Mining Company, an early Florida land scheme promoted to Ohio and Pennsylvania residents.

While the map shows an elegant urban grid (curiously devoid of street names), there is almost no indication of human activity.    It is almost as if the plat map was intended to be recycled and used for a new fraudulent scheme, once the present scheme ran its course!

A report by Pamela Brown for the University of Florida’s Soil and Water Department notes:

A Cincinnati mail-order company, the Saint Andrew Bay Railroad, Lands, and Mining Co., bought property in the Saint Andrew Bay area, and started nationally advertising 25 feet x 82 feet lots for $1.25. The advertisement attracted a lot of people and started a settlement boom as over 300,000 lots were sold. As the price for lots increased to $8.00, the company went bust.

The map is accompanied by a Warranty Deed ) from the St. Andrews Bay Railroad, Land, & Mining Co. to John J. Campbell  (of Winona, Mississippi), dated  March 17, 1887 and signed by Herbert Healy (?) a Notary Public in Hamilton County, Ohio.

The fraud did not end with the transfer, as the owner also received a follow up solicitation from M.C. Pitman Real Estate and Abstracts of Vernon, Florida, noting that his company's "investigating" the county records found a deed to a parcel of land in the St. Andrews Bay project, "the most progressive section of West Florida," with land values increasing "300 to 500 percent within past six months."  For only $5.00 by ceritified check or Post Office Money Order, Pitman would "give you a full disclosure of records as above." 

 St. Andrews Bay Railroad, Land, and Mining Company

In the late 1880s, the  St. Andrews Bay Railroad, Land, and Mining Company, also known as the Cincinnati Company because it was based in Ohio, promoted real estate investment in St. Andrews by the Sea, offering lots by mail order with the following promotion:

The loveliest location in all Florida. In a land where the genial climate of a winterless round of years will reward your every effort with the most bountiful harvests; where the summers are joyous seasons of refreshing breezes and invigorating nights of cool and healthful slumber; and where the winters are but bewitching contrasts to the summers in heightening and intensifying the delicious pleasure of a life  in the fairest land the sun ever blessed with its genial kiss.  There is but one Florida, and St. Andrews Bay is its brightest jewel.

The scheme ultimately failed, but many of the buyers decided that they liked the area.  

In 1908 St. Andrews incorporated as a town for the first time. It grew to become a popular port in the early 1900s, and a regular stop on the shipping line between Mobile and Apalachiola.  In 1927, the town was annexed by Panama City.

Rarity

OCLC locates no examples of the broadside.