The Creation of Juno Beach Historical Plaque

The plaque here reveals how an area of marshy scrubland became a booming tourist mecca in a little over a decade. This was all the work of a West Palm Beach development company, Bessemer Properties. There are lots of interesting details and images on the plaque.

You’ll be interested to learn that the name Juno Beach actually dates from around 1890, but it had no connection to today’s town. Here’s the curious story!

As Palm Beach was just beginning to take off as a tourist destination around 1890, a group of developers bought land on the narrow strip on the north end of today’s Singer Island by MacArthur State Park. That was just a short boat ride from the busy new village of Juno at the head of Lake Worth, which was the county seat and which they saw as the future regional center. The developers laid out plots running from lake to ocean and cleverly advertised them with the name Juno Beach. Unfortunately for the developers, their strategy quickly collapsed once word got out that Henry Flagler was planning to extend his Florida East Coast Railway all the way to Palm Beach.

As the historical plaque explains, it wasn’t until the late 1940s that Bessemer Properties chose to create a new tourist destination and give it the name Juno Beach.

By the way, the lovely fountain here is called Friendship Circle. The path around the lake was funded by donors whose names are inscribed on bricks along the way.