A little more than a hundred years ago, people from up and down the East Coast would journey to a small island in Lake Worth Lagoon to down “Dr. Munyon’s Paw-Paw Elixir,” a cure-all said to heal rheumatism, nervousness, sleeplessness and a whole host of other maladies.
There were several problems. James M. Munyon was not a doctor. His elixir was little more than fermented papaya juice. And the resort from which he sold it, the Hygeia Hotel on Munyon Island, also offered a “fountain of youth,” the waters of which were just plain old H2O pumped into the well through pipes connected to the mainland.
We were turned on to one of South Florida’s earliest and more successful snake-oil salesmen as part of our Sound Off South Florida project, in which we investigate answers to questions submitted by you, our readers.
Recently, we delved into Florida history to answer the question, “Are Pine Island and Rock Island roads named after actual islands?” And we draw water again from that historical well, as reader Robert Boggy wrote in to ask, “What do we know about the hotel/bar on stilts that housed/fed commercial fisherman and blue collars that burned down (early 1900s) Munyon Island?”
After researching, there were a couple issues with the premise of the question. Munyon’s resort hotel was a five-story, high-end affair that catered largely to wealthy northerners, not local fishermen. Also, the place wasn’t on stilts. But it did burn down in 1917, with Munyon dying a year later, capping off a several-decade career in flimflammery.
What’s now known as Munyon Island was first settled by Nathan and Carrie Pitts in 1892, according to records held by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. At about the same time, Munyon was beginning his career in “homeopathic remedies” in Philadelphia.
The Pitts had moved from Massachusetts to Ormond, Fla., in 1876 due to Carrie’s failing health. There, Nathan Pitts “soon made his worth known, being closely identified with all matters of public improvement,” according to a 1902 obituary published in The Tropical Sun, South Florida’s first newspaper.
In a moment of land speculation awesome even in the history of South Florida, Pitts bought five acres on the west shore of Lake Worth for $2 in the winter of either 1887 or 1888 and sold it in 1891 for $3,500. The next year, he bought all of what became Munyon Island from the U.S. government, according to “A Tropical Frontier,” a history of early Florida settlement published in 2005.
Up until that point, what was then called Pitts Island, had been uninhabited — or at least unsurveyed. An 1896 history of the area, “The Lake Worth Historian,” tells a different, more colorful story, explaining that Pitts bought the island “from an old hermit by the name of Rogers, who had lived a Robinson Crusoe existence on a little clearing of its almost impervious thicket under the dense shade of a huge banyan tree.”
Either way, Pitts built a little hotel on the island in 1901 before selling to Munyon, who had much grander plans. His five-story Hygeia Hotel, named for the Greek goddess of health, included resort and spa activities, the aforementioned “fountain of youth,” and a seemingly never-ending supply of Munyon’s Paw-Paw Elixir.
The snake-oil salesman then began his ad campaign, a blitz of full-page ads in East Coast newspapers declaring the healing powers of his elixir. The marketing of the resort and its elixir went so far as to include an official song, penned by Munyon, entitled “Down Where the Paw-Paw Grows,” the last verse of which went: “Munyon’s Isle all hearts beguile/Down where the paw-paw grows/There’s joy for each at gay Palm Beach/Down where the paw-paw grows.”
Munyon laid out his grand plans for the island in a contemporaneous newspaper account, saying, “Before long we will have gondolas, sailing the waters around the island and passing under Japanese bridges and Venetian columns. … People from all over the world will come here to enjoy the climate and drink from my fountain of youth.”
In 1913, Munyon’s son Duke went into business with him, according to a Tropical Sun article, and the massive expansion of the hotel began. Duke “formed a syndicate of northern capitalists” who paid to clear land on the north end of the island to build private winter homes for the wealthy, according to the article.
But those plans never came to fruition. The Hygeia Hotel burned down in 1917, and Munyon died the next year. Harry Kelsey, later the developer of Lake Park, bought the island from the Munyon estate for $65,000 in promissory notes, and was then sued by the estate in 1926 for nonpayment. The island was foreclosed on and returned to Munyon’s estate, and was sold again in 1932, after which it was used to dump sand dredged from the Intracoastal, eventually more than doubling the size of the 15-acre island.
Munyon Island came into the possession of John D. MacArthur in the 1950s, and from there was bought from his estate by the state of Florida as part of what became John D. MacArthur State Park.
Today, the island makes for a great kayaking excursion, but the foundation and anything else that remains of Munyon’s resort has long since been buried by time and tons of sand.
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dsweeney@SunSentinel.com, 954-356-4605 or Twitter @Daniel_Sweeney