The Town of Palm Beach is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The Intracoastal Waterway separates it from the neighboring cities of West Palm Beach and Lake Worth. In 2000, Palm Beach had a year-round population of 10,468, with an estimated seasonal population of 30,000. In 2018, Bloomberg ranked Palm Beach as the 27th-wealthiest place in the United States.
Prior to being established as a resort by Henry Morrison Flagler, who made the Atlantic coast barrier island accessible via his Florida East Coast Railway, Palm Beach was a sparsely populated part of Lake Worth. The nucleus of the community was established by Flagler's two luxury resort hotels, the Royal Poinciana Hotel and The Breakers Hotel. West Palm Beach was built across Lake Worth as a service town and has become a major city in its own right.
Flagler's house lots were bought by the beneficiaries of the Gilded Age, and in 1902 Flagler himself built a Beaux-Arts mansion, Whitehall, designed by the New York-based firm Carrère and Hastings and helped establish the Palm Beach winter "season" by constantly entertaining. The town was incorporated on 17 April 1911.
An area known as the Styx housed the people who built up the island. Workers rented small houses from the landowners. In the early 1900s, the landowners agreed to evict all of the residents of the Styx (who moved to West Palm Beach, Florida) and Edward R. Bradley bought up much of this land. The houses were razed, according to the Palm Beach Daily News.
The wreck of the Providencia is credited with giving Palm Beach its famous name. The Providencia was traveling from Havana to Cádiz, Spain with a cargo of coconuts harvested on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, when the shipwrecked near Palm Beach. Many of the coconuts were naturalized or were planted along the Palm Beach coast. A lush grove of palm trees soon grew on what would later be named Palm Beach. Today the tallest coconut palms in the United States can be found along the Palm Beach coast.
Credit for the data above is given to the following website:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Beach,_Florida
