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Hibbard Casselberry came to Florida, in part, to take the pulse of the boom for Welsbach and declare it dead or alive. Granted, the idea of Fern Park Estates raised his own pulse. Like thousands of people lured by the tempting call of Florida's economic climate, he probably indulged in an occasional daydream about what it would be like to stay in the Sunshine State, searching for the promised easy money and languorous living. Had Hibbard looked more closely, however, he might have discovered that the majority of those stories he had read were as illusory as the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Developers in search of intoxicating profits had a lingo all their own: near meant far, high meant low, and great meant small. One development, Hollywood-by-the-Sea, was located so far inland that the reference to the ocean became an embarrassment, and the developer dropped it. At the height of the boom, the mere opening of a subdivision map on the street caused such frenzy that Miami passed a law against anyone opening a map on the streets! Later, most subdivisions sold land from blueprints and drawings because they closed more deals.

Among developers, competition to sell the next Promised Land was tougher than fighting mosquitoes in a mangrove swamp. In Key Largo, developers hired Ben Hecht to concoct a sales gimmick, and he delivered a whopper. Hecht lured the gullible with stories about the sudden discovery of approximately $500,0000 ($5.9 million) of buried pirate treasure. Con men, like puppeteers, danced visions of enormous wealth in front of the fawn-eyed suckers. Heaping piles of riches awaited, they told prospects, but digging could only be done by the lucky few buyers who purchased the lots. Suckers lined up, practically begging developers to take their money. In reality, no pirate booty existed. What was real was that the developers had bought some doubloons and stuffed them into old Spanish vases, then buried the stashes in the sand.

Equally well planted was the attendant publicity in the right newspapers for the fake treasure trove. In only one week, the Key Largo Company had sold more than $1,000,000 ($11.8 million) worth of snake-covered, bug-haunted, jungle land.

Although Hibbard did not expect to go far south as the Keys, he planned a stop in Boca Raton, a creation of architect Addison Mizner. The highly developed skills Mizner had honed as a con man, helped him draw in bluebloods and aristocrats as partners. With their fortunes, Mizner expressed his eccentric visions in a way that one person described as the "Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance-Bull-Market-Damn-the-Expense Style." More than his architecture, what made Mizner legendary was his marketing director, Harry Reichenbach, some called him "the most gifted mob psychologist since P. T. Barnum." Wilson Mizner, Addison's colorful con man brother, called the scheme "the platinum sucker trap." When they sprung the trap on Boca Raton's potential buyers in June 1925, the Mizner Corporation snatched a cool $9 million ($106.4 million) in the first nine weeks.

Reichembach employed a simple but effective strategy: "Get the big snobs and the little snobs will follow." By skillfully using financially stricken members of European royalty to impress greedy and the naïve, as well as wealthy people who wanted to rub elbows with the royals came in droves. Dazzled by the presence of a member of a royal family, any royal family, no matter how minor or obscure the lineage, hundreds of eager and gullible buyers were moved to unquestioningly hand over fistfuls of cash to the unscrupulous developers. If Hibbard had gone to Boca Raton, he might have heard how Princess Ghika of Rumania not only lent her royal name to Addison Mizner's development but of her reaction to receiving paid her commission late. In a less-than-regal manner, the princess burst into the office and shouted, "Where's my money? If you think I'm in this goddam plebian swamp for my health, you're crazy as hell." When a rival development secured the defection of the Countess of Lauderdale and her husband, Reichembach tried to literally kidnap the King of Greece and secure him for their subdivision. Such high jinx had been pulled off before.

Then the con started to unravel. Addison Mizner's scam had run smoothly in the light of day, until the whirlwind of anti-Florida propaganda hit shore in the fall of 1925. One of Mizner's foremost blue-blooded partners, Senator T. Coleman du Pont of Delaware, had organized a pro-Florida rally at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and tried to get Mizner to clean up his operation. By this time, however, Mizner lived in delusions of grandeur, as if he were financially bulletproof. When du Pont led an exodus of investors away from Mizner Development Corporation, shock waves flashed through Florida. The wake-up call rattled consumer confidence throughout the state.

Mizner needed to do damage control. To keep his organization afloat, he turned to his cohorts at three banks: the Palm Beach National Bank, the Commercial Bank and Trust Company, and the First American Bank and Trust Company of West Palm Beach. By the end of the 1925, Mizner touted that his group's efforts - not du Pont's - had produced the mind boggling $30 million ($355 million) in sales. Mizner really "put it over!", declared the Palm Beach Post.

Donald H. Conkling, owner of the newspaper, knew just how Mizner did it. The Mizner and Conkling relationship was a prime example of how Florida's web of unholy alliances worked. Besides owning the Palm Beach Post, Conkling was a stockholder in the Mizner Development Corporation. He was also a real estate promoter. To round out his resume, Conkling was also a banker and owned stock in the same banks that financed Mizner.

When the Mizner-Conkling machine cranked into full gear, the Post ran favorable stories about Mizner's projects. In return, the newspaper received buckets of money for full-page ads from the Mizner Corporation and other developers, who wanted the same buyers. The ads urged the wealthy and others to buy property at grossly inflated prices. When they did, developers paid off their bank loans.

To keep such an elaborate swindle alive took more than investors, politicians, bankers, a promoter, and a newspaper owner. The scheme needed rush after rush of fresh suckers to buy land. Instead of waiting around Boca Raton, however, Mizner started feathering his newest nest among a different batch of snowbirds in Orlando, just south of Aunt Mae's Winter Park home.

Another spark that lit Florida's boom was the banker form of government that had begun with the election of Governor Cary A. Hardee in 1921. Hardee, who also served as president of the First National Bank of Live Oak, encouraged other bankers to flex their political muscle. Bankers reached for the public's wallet, as did government regulators, including Florida Comptroller Ernest Amos. Amos had been borrowing from the banks he regulated, and then pouring the cash into land deals. When banks failed, they were still a valuable political asset for Amos. He appointed his buddies as receivers and attorneys for the failed banks and they picked over any tasty crumbs left in the portfolios.

The "good ol' boys" in Florida ran their network slicker than riverboat cardsharps. Financing most of them was the influential Manley-Anthony chain of banks. Wesley D. Manley had worked his way up through W. S. Witham's Bankers Financing Company in Atlanta, and the Witham chain of banks. From Witham, Manley learned creative financing, banker style. In short, if he borrowed money from Bank A, he could use the money to buy controlling shares of Bank B. Once he owned controlling shares of stock of Bank B, it was simple to get a loan from Bank B to pay off Bank A. The shares of Bank B could then be used to purchase control in Bank C. With this maneuver, Witham and Manley ended up with a chain of 108 banks.

J. R. Anthony's meteoric rise in the banking industry resulted from his partnership with Manley. By 1914, Anthony had already garnered political clout at both state and national level with his First National Bank of Miami, but he lacked the capital to expand his banking operations. Because Anthony had always kept the right wallets full in Tallahassee, the merger to create Bankers Financing of Jacksonville went smoothly.

In South Florida, Anthony had taught Howard P. Smith and D. Lester Williams what he had learned about the art of promoter banking. When they opened the Palm Beach National Bank, they knew how to load a bank with their loans, and then sell out to another promoter who had the same plans. Smith and Williams initially owned 25 percent of the Palm Beach National Bank. However, they and their partners borrowed at least 182 percent of the bank's capital. To keep the swindle flowing, Smith made loans to the state's top regulators, thus influencing them not to burden the bank with curious auditors. Not surprisingly, Mizner was entrenched in the food chain, also. However, none of these men, or others like them, created the schemes they perpetuated.

The journey into America's debt began in 1910, long before the banking fraud, when Hibbard was a young man of seventeen. His grandfather Gold Hibbard, like many industrialists of the decade before, had died, but left America with a hope-filled future. Young men Hibbard's age expected the years ahead to be filled with fun, adventure, and, they hoped, the right career path. In due time, the right feminine companionship would lead to marriage and a family.

No one had uttered the words Great War, stock market crash, or Great Depression. Success seemed assured. Businesses paid for their corporate expansions out of their own profits. The federal government was thrifty, and lived within its means. It was even paying off its national debts. For the world's most powerful bankers, such bliss left them with more competition and less profit.

To solve the problem, seven representatives of banking and government met at Jekyll Island, Georgia. These few men represented an unimaginable concentration of wealth that moved both the United States and Europe: Nelson W. Aldrich, Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission; Abraham Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful bank at the time. Vanderlip also represented William Rockefeller, and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Henry Davidson represented J. P. Morgan Company, while Charles D. Norton represented Morgan's First National Bank of New York. Benjamin Strong rounded out Morgan's interest by representing Bankers Trust Company. Internationally, Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, represented the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and was a brother to Max Warburg, the head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.

Once they shuffled their influence, the cards were in the hands of J. P. Morgan, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, and three of American's political powerhouses. In an address before the American Bankers Association the following year, Aldrich laid it out for anyone who was really listening to the meaning of his words. He said, "The organization proposed is not a bank, but a cooperative union of all the banks of the country for definite purposes.' A. Barton Hepburn of Chase National Bank was even more candid. ‘The measure recognizes and adopts the principals of a central bank. Indeed, if it works out as the sponsors of the law hope, it will make all incorporated banks together joint owners of a central dominating power." While lobbying for passage of their plan, the terms "cooperative" and "union" brought all banks to mind.

This cartel, blessed by the government in 1913, was not federal, nor did it have reserves to lend, but the name Federal Reserve System sounded good. It could now print money, and loan it to anxious borrowers, especially the government. To leave no doubt in the minds of those who listened, Aldrich was quoted in the July 1914 magazine, The Independent: "Before the passage of this Act, the New York bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country."

With two parts in place, banking and politics, Morgan added newspapers, in March 1915. When Representative Callaway from Texas rose to address Congress in 1917, he exposed this third leg of the plan. "They (the Morgan interests) found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers," and they did so by flexing its power with advertising.

To Morgan, games such as bankers were playing played in Florida was chump change. In the eighteenth century, the czar of European banking, Baron Rothschild declared, "I buy when blood is in the streets." So do warring countries, which look for a ready source of cash to keep their armies paid, equipped, and fighting. Rothschild happily filled their need. Peace, however, was not beneficial to his bottom line. J. P. Morgan carried on that tradition. His enterprises funded England's war against Germany, and he was in risk of losing that investment. Then his silent powers bumped America from its neutral position into the Great War, America loaned money to England. The appreciative England paid off its debt to Morgan, and bought more artillery through Morgan. By the time the war was over, United States Treasury had loaned a total of $9,466,000,000 ($112 billion), which included $2,170,000,000 ($25.5 billion) given after the Armistice.

No citizen outside of a small clique of insiders understood how the bottomless bog of marketing scams, banking fraud, and financial abuse sucked money up from the unsuspecting. In Florida, with the politicians and newspapers continually polishing its image, Hibbard and Barnett had no idea of who to believe or what was ahead of them.

So after considerable conversation and pumping Hibbard's good ear full of word picture after word picture of the coming glories of Fern Park Estates, Barnett needed to close the deal; otherwise, when Mel's ankle healed, Hibbard would travel back to Winnetka. Barnett took Hibbard to his property on Lake Concord, to see the area to which he had applied his vision, to an area he expected soon to be filled with artists and writers sustaining their passion with a no-effort livelihood.

The little valley ignited that dormant spark inside Hibbard, and he bonded with it, as surely as Gold Hibbard had bonded to Chicago in 1849. Gold, a visionary with an indomitable "I Will" spirit, quickly sized up the city in the mud and decided to use his time and energy to help transform it into a boomtown. He kept his word, and in doing so, built an empire that would last more than a century. Hibbard had the same spirit, and, thanks to his family and his own selling skill, he had more jingle in his pocket than Gold started with. Aside from that inner spark, however, he had to size up Fern Park Estates.

The ground Barnett showed Hibbard didn't seem like much at first. It appeared wounded, with a cavernous bulldozer cut slashing across its middle, like a wound from a machete. Some of the pines still showed a bleached white cut, with their bark violated by tapping for turpentine. Immediately north of Barnett's land, several grave markers remained to honor the handful of settlers and young soldiers, such as Pvt. Stephen Hooker who had lived and fought there. In 1893, when the Florida legislators called for the Indian's removal, the area had been known as Fort Concord. With only a small number of Seminole Indians living nearby, the skirmishes were few. Outside of a few houses, not much had been built since then. Everywhere, Hibbard could see a wild tangle of thick palmettos, pines, and scrub oaks, but at least five pristine lakes nestled within a half a mile. The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad tracks lay a mile to the west. Now that the state was going to cut a new ten-mile highway, straight from Winter Park to Sanford, the Seminole County seat, Fern Park Estates was situated dead center between the two cities.

When Hibbard had rheumatic fever, Gold told him so many stories of his own youthful pioneer days and of men who made Chicago great. "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood," advised Daniel H. Burnham, Director of Works for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. "No one of intelligence can deliberately throw away his opportunities," said Gold's partner, A. C. Bartlett, in priming young men for success. Even the Bible said, "Without vision, a people perish." Though Hibbard's rheumatic fever had long passed, he now had a fever of a different sort, the fever of transforming Florida scrubland into a thriving area. As Barnett's exclusive sales agent for Fern Park Estates, he could blend his energy and talents into producing homes and businesses, perhaps even a new city, as the International Press Association planned for Press City.

Hibbard mulled over his commitment to Welsbach. Like other employers up North, Welsbach knew the risks in sending an employee to Florida. Between its weather, beaches, and opportunities, either real or imagined, almost no one returned for months, if at all. Hibbard probably reported to Welsbach what he had seen in Central Florida, and what others had told him about the situation farther south. However, before he quit his job completely, Hibbard needed to make sure he had a new one. That meant facing his first prospect, and by all odds the most resistant: a woman with a mind of her own, who also deeply detested the Florida summer heat.

When Hibbard approached Mel with the idea of living in Florida, certain words must have caught in her throat. No matter how blunt, or at what volume she wanted to respond to such an absurd idea, they were guests in Aunt Mae's home. Mel composed herself like a woman of good breeding, then boiled the answer down to an emphatic, "No." She made it perfectly clear to Hibbard that she had no intention of living in Winter Park. As a woman brought up in a gracious home and who had learned the niceties of moving in society circles, she had great appreciation for the amenities and cultural atmosphere that the town's social season provided. That life drew her like a magnet. But she also told Hibbard that she was painfully aware of the off-season reality. Hotels boarded up. Fashionable shops closed, leaving their stylish windows hidden behind grimy brown butcher paper for the rest of the year.

Only blocks from the college, the town garage sold baby alligators to the few tourists who trod the streets. The reptile's adult population shared the local swimming spots with local children. Mel undoubtedly had visions of little Hib caught in the jaws of an alligator in the lake out back. Leonard would be a mere morsel. She declared she would not spend the sweltering summers living in the hot, sweaty, mosquito-infested State of Florida.

With those heated words ringing in Hibbard's good ear, Mel came back to the heart of the issue. After losing her mother, she wanted to be near her father, and he wanted her near him as well. Other than Aunt Mae and Mel's uncle Edgar Leonard, who also wintered there, her life, friends and family revolved around Winnetka, where she had been happily planted since childhood.

Undaunted by a seemingly immovable object, Hibbard drove her and little Hib out to Fern Park Estates, stood on the shore of Lake Concord, grandly swept his arm toward all the natural grandeur the scene possessed, and shared all that he and Barnett envisioned.

As Hibbard's naturally booming voice resonated with the wonders he foresaw the valley coming to, Mel must have thought both Barnett and her husband had been out in the sun too long. What could possibly be so entrancing about land ripped and split into ditches and gullies? No doubt she pondered the word pictures Hibbard was drawing, pictures that displayed artists and writers living comfortably there all year round doing, of all things, growing ferns. The entire prospect must have seemed like the far side of lunacy to her.

Another person felt the same. Author Jack Bechdolt received the same "invitation" to join Fern Park Estates in 1925. At first, he felt fortunate that the brochure's anonymous author had so understood and eloquently worded his plight. Then Bechdolt put a sharp pencil to the numbers estimated by the Barnett Fern Company. It appeared that if each estate produced what Barnett anticipated, seven times more ferns would flood the market. Rather than income, they could be assured that the price of ferns would drop. Bechdolt wrote that the author was not dishonest in his statements. "He has a genius for looking on the brightest possible side of everything. I would call him an incurable optimist - perhaps even a dangerous optimist." Unfortunately, the article appeared in the December 1925 issue of the Author's League Bulletin, not a newspaper or magazine Hibbard or Mel read. Worse yet, Hibbard's optimism equaled Barnett's own.

Men in Hibbard's family were nothing if not persistent; however, they would negotiate if necessary. In this case, negotiating was critical. Hibbard drove home what he thought was his most winning point. "Come on, Babe. We can try it for just one year," he told Mel earnestly. "If that doesn't work, we can go back."

When Mel heard Hibbard say that, she painfully, reluctantly, caved in. But she had strings attached to her consent: she could visit her father anytime she wanted, and under no condition would she have to endure Florida summers. At that point, Hibbard closed his most important sale.

Barnett had no time to bask in momentary excitement. He needed to get his subdivision recorded, his organization finalized, and Hibbard selling. In the two-year employment contract, Barnett required Hibbard to keep a retail office in Winter Park at his own expense, and pay for all his own advertising. In exchange, Hibbard would receive a 20% commission, which would be proportionally reduced if the property were sold on terms. The "competent sales staff" in the contract required Hibbard to keep included both Barnett and his father, each of whom would receive 10% of anything that Hibbard sold.

Hibbard may have been irked by being presented with an opportunity as Barnett's exclusive sales agent, only to be required to hire the father and son duo on his staff. The deal gave Barnett an added slice in his agent's cash flow. This may have been the reason why other brokers did not sign on to sell the property earlier. While Barnett arranged the stringent details, Hibbard broadcast his broad-brushed view of this new adventure to his family and acquaintances, a personality weakness that would hamper many deals in the future. They could not have talked him out of the arrangement. Once he faced the contract, Hibbard's ego and blind optimism would not have let him back down.

The chief objective of the subdivision was straightforward: to create an income-bearing fern industry, by getting people to buy, build, and operate their individual ferneries. Most writers and artists wouldn't have the skill or inclination to do such labor and run a business. Of course, the Barnett Fern Company could do the work for them for a fee. After all costs, however, the profit would pay for the mortgage. At the going rate for ferns, the system seemed plausible.

On March 15, 1926, Hibbard signed on to be Barnett's exclusive sales agent for Fern Park Estates. The contract signing took place in the office of Winter Park lawyer with a distinguished-sounding name: Vans P. Agnew. Agnew was prominent as the city's part-time city attorney and people took what he said seriously. While representing the town of Kissimmee in 1908, he had quipped that he was working on an ordinance to protect the little valley from airships and their barnstorming pilots. Though local people scoffed at the idea, the U.S. War Department and other cities paid heed, and asked for copies. Agnew's offhand remark became the forerunner of aviation regulation. Now Barnett and Hibbard wanted their shot at making history.

As Chicago residents hunkered in for record snowfalls, Hibbard and Mel dove into the previously unexplored world of self-employment. In posh Winter Park, the right location came at a considerable price. They chose a modest shop on fashionable Park Avenue, where Hibbard could watch for tourists emerging from the railway depot, especially during social season. They set up a florist business in front to do a daily business, and in the back, Hibbard sold Fern Park Estates. With his marketing skills in high gear, he created a three-dimensional display that allowed prospective buyers to feel as if they had just stepped into their own fern estate. The unique replica later became his trademark at florists' conventions.

Once Mel returned from Winnetka with little Leonard and their household furnishings, the family took up residence at Aunt Mae's. Mae's curios and antiques abounded throughout the house, and, of course, there was her prized international doll collection. A home filled with such valuables was no place for two eager and curious boys. "Don't touch that" rang down the halls frequently, as Mel kept a sharp eye on both boys to make sure they didn't break or damage anything, and also didn't burrow underneath the house. Soon, the family moved into the apartment above the floral shop.

A few months later, on June 7, 1926, Hibbard and Barnett finalized the Fern Park Estates plat. Their prospects boosted considerably by Florida Comptroller Amos' fresh quarterly report, bragging about "the unusually healthy condition" of the state's banks. It wouldn't be surprising if Hibbard and Barnett had some drinks to toast their good fortune. It seemed as though they had consummated their business relationship at exactly the right time. In reality, the timing could hardly have been worse.

To Chapter 5 - 1929 - Land Bust to Stock Market Crash

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