The steamer Comel in Key West Harbor C 1890. Moffat’s Photo.
1865 – Word reached Key West about the death of President Abraham Lincoln in Washington on April 15. All flags were at half-mast and Fort Taylor fired a gun every 1/2 hour.
1889 – The Mallory steamer Comal arrived at Key West from Galveston and reported a passenger had smallpox. Health authorities took charge of the vessel and ordered it to quarantine at the Dry Tortugas. The patient was placed in the hospital there and the Comal was fumigated.
1896 – The schooner Competitor, commanded by Alfredo LaBorde, left Key West for Sugarloaf Key. The schooner left Key West carrying 60 Cubans and Americans, 800 rifles, 600 revolvers, 500 machetes, and 150,00 rounds of ammunition to aid revolutionary forces in Cuba. At Sugarloaf, additional men and arms, including three “rapid-fire” guns, were taken on board. LaBorde intended to land the vessel at Pinar del Rio province within a day.
1898 – Inventor and motion picture pioneer Thomas A. Edison filmed multiple sequences at Key West, the first time the new technology was used in the Florida Keys. Edison filmed the funeral procession of victims of the USS Maine explosion, a yacht under the employ of the New York Journal, war correspondents running down Duval Street, and the battleship USS Indiana.
1901 – The schooners Harris Bros. and the Queen collided near Key Largo and the former sank. The night was extremely dark and neither boat had a light. The Queen struck the Harris Bros. just aft of the fore rigging, causing damage to itself and sinking the Harris Bros.
1952 – The Key West Players at the Barn Theater opened a show of five one-act dramas by Key West resident Tennessee Williams. Williams supervised all plays and personally directed “Mooney’s Kid Don’t Cry.”
1970 – As a way of combatting “an undesirable hippie element,” the Key West City Commission passed a vagrancy law that forbade sleeping in public places. It also created Key West’s first narcotics squad. Commissioner Jose Menendez said, “Unless the undesirables are chased out, Duval Street could become the counterpart to Haight Street in San Francisco.” Hippie leaders Robert “Zig Zag” Black and Bill Huckel took issue with the new laws and said the hippie community itself was better equipped to resolve any problems.
1980 – Key West fishing boasts Dos Hermanos and Blanche III arrived in Key West with 48 Cuban refugees, which began the Mariel Boatlift. By the end of the boatlift in late summer, more than 130,000 refugees had arrived in Key West.
1982 – A group of locals led by Attorney David Paul Horan filed suit in Federal Court in Miami to have the U.S. Border Patrol’s roadblock at Florida City removed.
1989 – James “Jimmy” Kirkwood, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, author, actor and playwright for whom Key West was his legal residence, died of spinal cancer in New York.
Information compiled by Tom Hambright, Historian Emeritus, and Dr. Corey Malcom, Lead Historian, Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.
Image: The steamer Comel in Key West Harbor circa 1890. Moffat’s Photo. Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.