Local History

Sometime next year, successive waves of archeologists, paleontologists and volunteer worker bees will start descending the banks of the Main Relief Canal behind the county administrative complex for an exacting, mostly teaspoon-by-teaspoon dig in the dirt. The quest: to find fossils and artifacts to complement a dispersed collection of earlier findings from the Old Vero Site – most notably, human bones found alongside remains of extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation conducted nearly a century ago.

“We have to be careful how we tell the prom story.” Knowing giggles ensue. The humorist is Cornelia Perez, but the friends having a laugh first knew her as Cornelia Auxier, daughter of Herschel and Lucy Auxier, one of the early Vero Beach families.

This is the story of the garden that refused to die.

Mention golf around Vero Beach, and everyone is familiar with John’s Island Club, The Moorings Club, Hawk’s Nest and Orchid.

As work nears completion on Vero Beach’s Model Block Extension, downtown at S.R. 60 and 14th Avenue, another transformation is taking place – the Scott’s Sporting Goods building at that busy corner is being restored to its original appearance.

Vero Beach is unique for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it straddles the Carolina temperate zone and the Caribbean subtropical zone.

If he hadn’t been the victim of a mustard-gas attack during the First World War, Alex MacWilliam might never have come to Vero Beach, and the town might have been a very different place to the city we know today.

Sipping a glass of iced tea in his South Beach home, Peter Benedict is discussing a topic he has been living and breathing for more than 30 years: Saint Edward’s School.

More that anywhere else, the Treasure Coast is the focus of paintings by the Highwaymen, that loose-knit group of black Fort Pierce artists who produced a cultural explosion unlike any other in our state’s social history.

In 1913, Axel Peterson traded a boarding house in Moline, Illinois, for 20 acres of land in Vero (not yet Vero Beach), Florida, sight unseen.

Captain Frank Forster, a seafaring man, is considered to have been the first settler in Wabasso.

After a nearly 30-year absence, the world’s largest one-piece mahogany table is back home at the Hall of Giants at McKee Botanical Garden.

A “Cracker” is a Florida cowboy.

The Barry MacTaggarts found Vero Beach via a wildly circuitous route.

The balmy breezes, warm climate and sea air of the Treasure Coast have nurtured many talents, but only a few with the creative force their peers label “genius.”

"Of no particular importance except as “a convenient place of resort for pirates.”

She is someone who – rather than bemoaning that things are not what they used to be – has spent her entire life embracing change and working to preserve, improve and enhance all that is valuable and unique about Indian River County.