How Dreams of Buried Pirate Treasure Enticed Americans to Flock to Florida During the Roaring Twenties

1925 marked the peak of the Florida land boom. But false advertising and natural disasters thwarted many settlers’ visions of striking it rich in the land of sunshine

Greg Daugherty - History Correspondent

April 15, 2025

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In the early 1920s, tens of thousands of people across the United States, many of whom had never set foot in Florida, made down payments on unbuilt lots in the Sunshine State, lured in by fanciful brochures and fast-talking salespeople.

“All of America’s gold rushes, all her oil booms and all her free-land stampedes dwindled by comparison with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida during the early fall months of 1925,” wrote journalist Mark Sullivan in his encyclopedic history of the era. “If Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth had just been found, it could hardly have attracted a greater multitude.”

In some cases, these buyers had no intention of ever taking up residence in the state; instead, they believed they could quickly flip their lots at an enormous profit, encouraged by tales of other Americans who’d purportedly made fortunes that way. Settlers who actually traveled to Florida to inspect their purchases were likely to be greeted by muddy parcels of worthless swampland overrun with snakes and mosquitoes, miles away from anything resembling civilization.

“By 1925, they were buying anything, anywhere, so long as it was in Florida,” wrote historian Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. “One had only to announce a new development, be it honest or fraudulent … to set people scrambling for house lots.”

Little wonder, then, that Charles Ponzi, the notorious swindler who gave his name to Ponzi schemes, branched out into Florida real estate, arriving in September 1925 while out on bail from charges in Massachusetts. Ponzi started selling what he claimed were desirable lots near Jacksonville, but which turned out to be swampland 65 miles to the west, much of it underwater.

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To be sure, Florida had its attractions, one of which was the sunny weather, although air conditioning was still rare at the time, and the heat and humidity could be oppressive for much of the year. The state had also become relatively easy to get to, either by rail or by automobile for the increasing numbers of Americans who now owned a car.

The possibility of getting in on the ground floor of a can’t-miss investment also enticed prospective buyers. Even if prices didn’t rise at the pace that boosters were promising, Florida land seemed likely to gain value in the years to come as Americans became increasingly mobile and enjoyed more leisure time.

“You could put your money in stocks, but everyone knew that the market could go down as well as up,” wrote Christopher Knowlton in his 2020 book, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression. “Florida real estate could only go up, it seemed.”

But even these enticements weren’t always enough. Real estate promoters sometimes found they needed fresh gimmicks to lure buyers to their particular developments. At that point, someone had a solid-gold epiphany: What if the priceless treasures of Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and their pirate peers lay buried beneath the soil, just waiting for the right shovel?

The excitement began building in 1918, when a developer named W.D. McAdoo claimed to have discovered a treasure chest full of Spanish doubloons on an island off St. Petersburg, where he was planning to break ground. The supposed find spurred interest not only in his island but also in a nearby one that developers quickly rechristened Treasure Island—a name the site retains to this day.

A few years later, to promote a resort being built by his brother, architect Addison Mizner, playwright Wilson Mizner and an enterprising publicist “buried some doubloons and some fake relics of Blackbeard in Boca Raton Inlet, [which] were disinterred amid wild excitement,” wrote journalist Alva Johnston in his dual biography of the Mizners.

In 1924, workers digging on another property near Boca Raton that was owned by a different developer reportedly unearthed a cache of 17th- and 18th-century Spanish and English coins. A year later, the developer sold a large tract of land in the area for $1 million (around $18 million today).

But perhaps the most elaborate hoax occurred in December 1925, when the legendary Chicago newsman and future Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht worked a brief stint as a publicist for a developer who hoped to turn the relatively desolate island of Key Largo into a vacation paradise—or at least a bonanza for himself.

As Hecht later told the story, he arranged to borrow a supply of Spanish doubloons from the president of Cuba, then buried the coins in vases he picked up in an antiques shop. Next, he hired a local beachcomber to “discover” the treasure.

Hecht reached out to newspaper editors across the U.S. and Canada, alerting them to the amazing find. Many ran accounts with Hecht’s byline, claiming the treasure was likely worth a quarter of a million dollars—the equivalent of roughly $4.5 million today. The budding screenwriter also invented a colorful backstory for the beachcomber, now transformed into a weather-beaten sea captain who’d devoted 25 years to his quest for the gold.

Hecht gave readers the impression that he had interviewed the captain in “his strange house—a dwelling put together out of the wrecks of ships that have gone down off Key Largo.” Asked what he intended to do with his new riches, the “captain” said he was “goin’ to spend it just like the pirate who buried it would have spent it if he had had the chance.”

First, he planned to buy a private Pullman car and head north by rail. “I’m goin’ to hire me a whole theater in New York and have all the girls playin’ in it for me,” Hecht quoted the man as saying. “Then I’m goin’ to hire me a little hotel in New York and have 50 different people waitin’ on me. And I’m goin’ to take along one of these here jazz bands … and have them play for me whenever I want them to.”

Enough newspaper readers took the bait that, “within 24 hours, craft of all sizes were chugging down the Florida coast for Key Largo,” Hecht wrote in his memoir, A Child of the Century. “They carried tents and provisions, spades and dynamite sticks.”

The Tennessee-based Commercial Appeal reported that “some 200 strangers … passed Christmas week on the island, frantically digging for pirate gold”—although it noted that some visitors appeared to be “spending more time ‘yo-hoing’ and ‘bottle of rumming’ than in hunting.”

There was just one catch for the would-be treasure hunters: To dig on the island, they had to buy one of the lots that Hecht’s employer was hawking. “In a week, the Key Largo company had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of snake-covered, bug-haunted jungle land,” Hecht recalled.

How much of this is true—either in the stories Hecht managed to plant in the newspapers or in his memoir, published almost 30 years later—is anyone’s guess. As Adina Hoffman, author of the 2019 biography Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, tells Smithsonian magazine, “He had a big imagination, and he used it liberally.”

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In any case, the great Florida land rush came to a screeching halt in 1926. Salespeople had exhausted the supply of eager buyers, and anyone who had already bought a lot or made a down payment on one now realized they’d be lucky to sell at a profit—if they could unload it at all.

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If that wasn’t enough, not one but two hurricanes struck the area, the second being the devastating Miami hurricane of 1926, then considered the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. South Florida was left in ruins, as were the fortunes of countless small investors who’d staked their dreams on their own little piece of it. Some developers, including Hecht’s employer, also lost everything.

By then, Hecht had decamped for Hollywood, where he would win the first Academy Award for Best Story for the gangster film Underworld (1927) and go on to write or co-write dozens of popular movies, including Scarface (1932), Wuthering Heights (1939) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).

Meanwhile, Americans still searching for a sure thing began looking north, toward Wall Street, where the stock market was hitting new highs by the day. They’d learn their lesson soon enough, starting with the harrowing crash of 1929. By 1932, with stocks down 89 percent from their precrash peak, even Florida swamp land might have seemed like a bargain, pirate treasure or not.

Greg Daugherty | Read More

Greg Daugherty is a magazine editor and writer, as well as a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine. His books include You Can Write for Magazines.