By Bob Davidsson
Lake Osborne is the center of a popular Palm Beach County recreational area for fishing, boating and camping with a hiking trail encircling most of its extent. .
The inland lake, located west of the cities of Lake Worth Beach and Lantana, was introduced to the nation by the name "Osborn" on the 1882 "Map of Dade County," distributed by the C.B. Colton and Company of New York. The Palm Beaches were part of Dade County between the 1860s and 1909.
Subsequent maps and pioneer documents would continue to refer to it as "Lake Osborn" until 1917, when the "Lake Osborne Addition" plat became the first to use the alternate common spelling of "Osborne". Originally called the "Osborne Colored Addition," the plat was changed to the less derogatory name of Osborne Addition in 1994.
Two families shared the same surname with the lake in the 19th century. Florida Sen. Thomas Ward Osborn (1868-73), and his older brother, The Rev. Abraham Coles Osborn, president of the Great Southern Railway Company, planned a railroad passing through Palm Beach County in the 1870s. The proposed route of the failed business venture was west of Lake Osborne.
The first known legal deed-holders on the lake belonged to a second New Jersey family, Ezra Asher Osborn (1823-95) of Monmouth County, and his son Frank. The father-son team headed a business syndicate in the 1880s that sought to enrich its investors by planting coconut groves on unoccupied coastal land purchased from Biscayne Bay to the Jupiter Inlet. A plague of rabbits led to its bankruptcy.
Early History of Lake Osborne
To the Seminole Indians, who hunted and fished along its shores, the lake was known by the poetic name of "Matal-ka-oska" or shining spirit of fresh water. Geologically, Lake Osborne is part of a 30-mile interconnected chain of lakes and sloughs located west of the Atlantic Coastal Ridge in Palm Beach County.
The nearest Seminole village, known as "Cha-Chi's Town," was located about five miles north of Lake Osborne, near the chain-of-lakes site today called Clear Lake in West Palm Beach. During the Second Seminole War, Capt. Richard Wade, leading a force of 60 men in 12 canoes, sacked Cha-chi's Town on Nov. 8, 1841, capturing 27 villagers in the raid.
He returned to the abandoned village one month later during a reconnaissance patrol of the Lake Worth Lagoon. Wade's engineer and topographer, Lt. Andrew A. Humphreys, made the following observation of the chain of lakes including Lake Osborne in his "Memoirs" on Dec. 19, 1841.
"Lagoons of deep water, covered by spatterdocks, are here and there met with, he wrote. "In many places, canoes have to be pushed and hauled, but at others the water expands into grassy lakes, a quarter of a mile in extent and generally one to two miles apart."
Spatterdocks (Nuphur Lutea) is a term used for a common aquatic plant found along the edges of the chain of lakes. The Seminoles used spatterdocks to stop bleeding and as a pain killer. It is edible and also is used as a natural tea.
The journal of early Palm Beach County pioneer Charles Pierce credits German emigrant Michael Merkel of Alsace-Lorraine as the first settler to homestead along the eastern shore of Lake Osborne. He sailed to the Palm Beaches in November 1878. The first pioneer to farm on the west shore of the lake was Benjamin "Uncle Ben" Lanehart.
Pierce wrote, "He (Merkel) built a very small palmetto shack on the south side of a large bay running eastward from the main body of the lake." Merkel lived most of his austere life as a hermit, living on fish, game and palm berries gathered along the shores of Lake Osborne. Neighbors to the east in the pioneering community of Jewell (Lake Worth) often heard him chanting in Latin, leading to the popular belief that he was a defrocked priest who had fled Europe.
The development of Lake Osborne began after the arrival of Morris Benson Lyman in 1884. Lyman served as the postmaster of the fledgling community of Lantana in 1889, and was appointed the first treasurer of Palm Beach County by Gov. Albert Gilchrist when it separated from Dade County in 1909.
Lyman became president of the "Lake Osborne Development Company," with his wife, Mary, working as vice president. The corporation acquired 770 acres of land between Lantana and Lake Osborne valued at about $75,000. The property was divided into tracts for the sale of homes and farming sites.
Lantana's founding father also served as one of the first supervisors appointed to the Lake Worth Drainage District (LWDD). Beginning in 1916 and continuing through the 1930s, the LWDD sponsored a series of projects lowering the water levels in the chain of freshwater lakes to clear their adjacent wetlands for agriculture and development.
Lakes Webster, Jackson, Bessie and Boynton vanished. The water levels in Lake Osborne were reduced by the completion of the E-4 canal in the 1930s. Today, the lake covers 378 acres, with an average depth of 6 to 8 feet.
Most of the western shore of Lake Osborne was acquired by Palm Beach County in the 1940s through the Florida Lands Acquisition Act and the lobbying efforts of Commissioner John Prince. Lake Osborne is utilized as both the John Prince Park recreational area, created in 1952, and as a reservoir within the C-16 drainage district.
(c.) Davidsson. 2020.
*NOTE: Read additional articles below and archived in Older Posts
