06/12/2026
On This Day in History: June 12, 1913
Meet Moorestown’s Mr. Miami Beach! Yep, you heard me right. Learn how a Quaker farmer established one of the top destination resort towns in the entire world. On this exact day in 1913, the historic Collins Bridge officially opened to the public, connecting the Florida mainland to a wild, mosquito-heavy barrier island for the very first time.
Before he was a Florida real estate legend, John Stiles Collins was a sixth-generation Moorestown farmer born in 1837. Deeply embedded in our local Moorestown Friends community, Collins was a massive agricultural innovator. In 1855, he established the Pleasant Valley Nurseries, which became widely famous for cultivating the Kiefer pear and the Wilson blackberry. If you live near Strawbridge Lake, walk around the housing developments of Collins Park, or know the Collins Tract in Pennsauken, you are walking on the literal roots of his South Jersey agricultural empire.
In his fifties, Collins took an adventurous gamble on Florida land, moving to South Florida at the turn of the twentieth century. He attempted to grow vegetables and coconuts on a swampy, bug-infested stretch of land between Miami and the ocean. While that initial farming venture wasn't a total success, Collins refused to back down. He managed to cultivate the world's largest avocado and mango groves, but shipping his "alligator pears" across the bay by boat was far too slow.
At seventy-four years old, Collins decided to build a massive wooden bridge to solve his transit problem. When his money ran out just a half-mile short of the finish line, Indiana auto-parts mogul Carl Fisher stepped in with a fifty-thousand-dollar loan in exchange for two hundred acres of beachfront land. Fisher famously described the elderly Moorestonian as "a bantam rooster, cocky and unafraid."
With the involvement of his family, including his sons and sons-in-law, Collins pivoted from farming to land development. The family formed the Miami Beach Improvement Company in 1911 and instituted the first recorded use of the term "Miami Beach."
According to period news reports, the June twelfth dedication of their new bridge was a massive spectacle. More than one thousand excited citizens attended the opening ceremony, watching two hundred pedestrians and nearly one hundred and fifty bicyclists cross the span. Two hundred cars also drove across the brand-new wooden bridge that day, though they immediately had to turn around because there were not any paved roads waiting for them on the beach yet. At two and a half miles long, it was celebrated as the longest wooden bridge in the world.
Following the bridge opening, the Collins family built a casino and an oceanfront hotel, kicking off the residential development of the island. While agriculture eventually gave way to the luxury tourism boom, Collins' legacy is permanently etched into Florida. The original wooden bridge was replaced in 1925 by what we know today as the Venetian Causeway, and Miami Beach's famous Collins Avenue still bears the name of Moorestown's fiercely determined Quaker farmer.
Learn more from the PBS American Experience article at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/miami-john-collins/
