Our Neighbor is...REDLAND

REDLAND
Clearing up unique area's name
Redland has a rich history and a plain name: It is Redland, not The Redland.
Posted on Sun, Aug. 10, 2008

BY GEORGE GRUNELL
Special to The Miami Herald
You may not be aware that Redland was settled well before Homestead.
When the first surveys were made on the Florida East Coast Railway Extension to Key West, it was thought that the railway would go through Redland on its way to Key West by way of Cape Sable.
Redland was already settled, although it wasn't called that yet. Instead, the rails were laid east of Redland and Homestead came into being.
When a petition was circulated in 1906 for the establishment of a post office in the area, a name for the community was needed.
Frank H. Kanen suggested the name Redland because of the pockets of red clay in the area. Mr. Kanen had homesteaded what is now the north corners of Coconut Palm Drive and Redland Road.
This name was accepted by the petitioners. Some of the people who had homesteaded in the area were refugees from the great freezes of the 1890s in North Florida.
Most of the homesteaders were convinced that this area was going to be the upcoming center of the citrus industry in Florida.
At that time, Redlands, Calif., was the center of a lot of the California citrus growing.
The growers here felt they were going to be in competition with their West Coast counterparts -- and they did not want their farming area confused with California's.
So they chose Redland without the ``s.''
Redland did become a major source of grapefruit and oranges through the 1920s, but our rock land soil would not support the production of fruit as the soil of Central Florida would. Citrus canker in the 1930s also took its toll on the local groves.
A Redland Post Office with John M. Bauer as postmaster was established in January 1907 in Bauer's store. Mr. Bauer had built his store earlier on his homestead on the west side of the trail that would later become Redland Road.
This store and post office was about 300 feet south of the present intersection of Bauer Drive and Redland Road on the west side (near the current home of a grandson of a later Redland postmaster.) I have photos of the original building. The Redland Post Office remained in operation until 1935 when it was closed; a victim of the Great Depression.
But decades earlier as part of a cost-cutting measure in May 1914 the Post Office Department said they were going to close the Redland Post Office along with 1,000 others. When word spread of the proposed closure, some Redland residents tried to incorporate an area to preserve the name Redland.
The father of Carl Schumacher, who many knew as the curator of the Pioneer Museum, was one of those people. He was proposed to be the constable.
When I was postmaster of Homestead, I had the job of setting ZIP Code boundaries in South Miami-Dade and I set the boundaries of 33031 to just about conform with the boundaries of this Redland incorporation attempt.
As one who has lived here long enough to have known many of the original homesteaders (my family came to the area in 1912), I know how many of them felt about the name.
Mr. Bauer told me that he had people argue with him that the name had an ''s'' on the end of it because they had read it that way in the newspaper. His response to them was that it was a newcomer who wrote that article and they were just ignorant of the truth. Our area is full of newcomers and you have to excuse their ignorance.
Even today most of our news writers are relative newcomers. Both Mr. Bauer and George Kosel, another early homesteader who was involved with the selection of the name, told me at different times about the Redlands, Calif., and Redland, Fla., competition in citrus. Both of these gentlemen were very adamant that the name be spelled correctly.
There have been several proposals to break off from Dade County and form a new county to be named Redland County back as far as the teens and as recently as the 1990s.
When The Miami Herald started using a prefix ''The'' with Redland, I called to ask why. I was told that it came from Jean Taylor's book, Villages of South Dade. I have never seen anything in her book that said this.
Now The Miami Herald has dropped the ''the'' and the ''s'' on the masthead of the Neighbors section area making it Redland.
That's how it should be.
George Grunwell and his wife Sharon are active in the Redland community, especially in preserving its history. Grunwell worked for the Homestead Post Office from 1949 to 1980 and was the postmaster from 1972-80. He is the author of many historical pieces about South Miami-Dade and is a regular contributor to the Redland Country News.