The Swamp Peddlers

This week, I’m vacationing in Florida with my family and it seemed like a good time to read Jason Vuic’s new book, The Swamp Peddlers:  How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (UNC 2021). Some readers of my blog might remember my long-standing fascination with the huge platted communities here in Florida. Places like Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, Golden Gate, and Port Charlotte. That said, I really didn’t know the history of these places and why their sprawling street grids often lacked homes and seemed to be fading into the Florida wilderness. 

Vuic’s book answers this question in style. Most of the places that had so fascinated me were schemes by developers, lots sellers, and land scammers to attract money from middle-class retirees in the north and midwest by offering them lots on installment plans. In some cases these lots were simply not buildable owing to the seasonal flooding or inadequate infrastructure. In other cases, these lots were undesirable because they formed parts of sprawling developments that lacked room for commercial development, lacked amenities, and fell far short of the promises made by developers. In other words, these neatly platted, but empty developments represented a combination of areas never suitable for building, failed ambition, and inadequate planning. Vuic’s book unpacks the various schemes, scams, and personalities that led to this distinctive landscape.

The archaeologist in me is fascinated by the history of these marginal places. They don’t represent traditional example of abandonment in that they were never really used intensively. At the same time, these spaces did see uses ranging from intermittent development to illegal marijuana farming, land strips for small airplanes, or, in the case of River Ranch Acres, as hunting, camping, and squatting grounds.

There is something about these spaces at the very edges of capitalism. In many ways, they’re shaped by capital, but they also somehow exist at the edges of what capitalism sought to project onto the landscape. Squatters, drug runners, hermits, and loners have founds a sense of place in these strangely marginal places in our landscape. A project designed to document the use of these spaces would shed light on how places carved out of the Florida wilderness through dodgy land schemes mapped out the rough edges of capitalism. These places sought to create ambivalent futures that were suspended between the dreams of the post-war suburban middle class and the avarice of developers.

Needless to say, I’ll likely never pursue this project, but the more I read about these developments in Florida the more fascinated I am about their potential to reveal something about how we negotiate our relationship with not only the future, but also capital.