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Historical
Museum of Southern Florida |
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Traditions:
South Florida Folklife Maritime Skills and Occupations South Florida is rich in traditional skills and occupations rooted in the natural environment. They range from cowboying in Davie to boatbuilding in Miami, frogging in the Everglades, and farming in Homestead. All such occupations include techniques, gestures, narratives, and customs shared by workers during their daily activities. People who engage in these traditional occupations sometimes attain such a high level of competence in the execution of a process or in the form and decoration of a product that they are truly artists. The inland and coastal waters of south Florida teem with tropical aquatic life, so Floridians have developed many skills and occupations in order to reap the rich marine harvest. For instance, Florida's coastal waters are the only habitat in the United States where sponges grow. Sponge gathering and processing is not new to the Miami area; by the 1890s, hundreds of sponge boats operated by Americans, Conchs, and Bahamians were active from Miami south through the Keys. In the early twentieth century, Key West competed with Tarpon Springs for the greater share of the sponge market. With the sponge blight from 1938 to 1952, however sponging, throughout Florida diminished considerably.
Sponges are collected by one of two methods. In shallow waters fishermen hook sponges with a four-pronged rake attached to a pole measuring up to 40 feet in length. In deeper waters, divers using an airhose and diving suit cut the sponges from the beds. After they harvest the sponges, the fishermen dump them into crawls, or wooden enclosures at the water's edge. Two or three days later, they beat the sponges with a piece of wood in order to remove the black outer skins, then dry them so the sponges will keep until sold to the processor. At the warehouse the sponges are dampened, then cut into sizes between five and ten inches in diameter. Next, the sponges are trimmed to a round, even shape, sorted into one of five grades, and dried in the sun. Sponges meant for cosmetic or decorative purposes are cleaned chemically to lighten their natural orange-tan color. Finally, the sponges are counted into lots, stuffed into burlap sacks, and pressed into bails for shipping.
The few South Florida residents who still make the skiffs now use different materials than in the past. Formerly, cypress was preferred because of its moisture-resistant qualities. In the last 50 years, cypress has become increasingly rare, and skiffs are now constructed of plywood, redwood or fiberglass. Folklife surrounds us in our daily lives — we live beside it and practice it, yet it is so much a part of our habits and environment that we rarely notice it. By learning more about folklife, both ours and others, perhaps we can better understand where we came from, who we are, and where we are going.
 
Folk Arts | Arts
& Crafts | Architecture | Foodways
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Nestled
on the Miami River, near downtown, is the Arrellano brothers' sponge packing
warehouse. Here sponge fishermen from Biscayne Bay and the Keys bring
the different types of sponges they harvest — wool, yellow, grass
and glove -- to be processed, packed and shipped. It was largely through
the efforts of the Arrellano brothers that the sponge industry was revitalized
in the early 1960s. Today, Miami is the commercial sponge center of Florida,
and most east coast sponge fishermen are Cuban.
Not
far inland from the coast, the Everglades encompasses millions of acres
of wetlands. The people who settled in the Glades have developed unique
types of transportation to navigate the wilderness in search of fish and
game. The glades skiff (also called a pole boat) is a long, narrow canoe-like
boat that was commonly used through the early twentieth century. Traditional
skiffs are about one foot high, up to 16 feet long, but only about two
feet wide in the mid-section. They are slightly tapered and lift slightly
in the stem so as to reduce drag in the shallow water. The skiff's flat
bottom and long, narrow shape enable it to glide long distances when the
navigator stands in the center and pushes it along with a pole.
