An Emerging Protestant Establishment: Religious Affiliation and Public Power on the Urban Frontier in Miami, 1896–1904

Abstract

A photograph taken in 1896, the year of Miami's incorporation, circulated widely in periodicals of the time, and it came to symbolize the founding of the city in the local and national imagination (figure 1). “That picture has gone all over this country,” one of the men who posed for it recalled, “showing the start of Miami.” In the image seventeen men stand by the mouth of the Miami River, where workers were clearing the ground for the construction of the first tourist hotel, a building owned by a wealthy northern Protestant. For the historian, the carefully posed photograph is illuminating. Most important for the purposes of this essay, it offers hints about power relations in that urban frontier. Note the four white men dressed in their Sunday best who stand behind the workers and observe the scene. They were there that day because John Sewell, the white Baptist who supervised the crew, had hurried down the dirt street to invite "the boys" to get into the historic picture. For Sewell, “the boys” meant white mainline Protestants, each of whom had arrived relatively recently to seek his fortune.