Stuart, FL
Built 1942 as Naval Air Station Stuart — anti-submarine warfare patrols from here covered the coastal shipping lanes when U-boats were sinking tankers off Florida. Named postwar for Homer Marshall Witham, county commissioner. One of Florida's most beautifully kept GA airports — wide green ramp, river views, and a steady fly-in restaurant tradition.
On the beach at Pepper Park, Fort Pierce — the only museum dedicated to the history of US Navy SEALs and their predecessors. Original 1942 sand-table model and obstacle course remnants from the WWII amphibious training that started here. Apollo BP-1101 training capsule on display — used by SEALs to rehearse the Apollo 11 splashdown recovery. Memorial wall for SEALs killed in action since WWII. Small, focused, and serious — five miles from KFPR.
Henry Flagler partnered with John D. Rockefeller in 1867 to found Standard Oil. By 1885 he was one of the richest men in America, by 1900 he was substantially retired from Standard Oil to focus on Florida. He built the Florida East Coast Railway from Jacksonville to Key West, the chain of grand hotels along its route, and effectively created the modern east coast of Florida from Daytona to Miami to Key West. His three marriages produced his three Florida hotels — and his third marriage produced Whitehall. Whitehall is the 75-room Beaux-Arts winter home Flagler built in 1902 in Palm Beach as a wedding present for his third wife Mary Lily Kenan. He hired Carrère and Hastings — the New York architects who would later design the New York Public Library — and gave them 18 months and an unlimited budget. The result was the most expensive home in America at the time of construction (about $4 million in 1902, or roughly $135 million today). The Marble Hall entry is 110 feet long and 40 feet wide, paneled in seven varieties of marble. The Music Room has a $7,500 Odell organ; the ceiling was painted by an artist Flagler imported from Italy. The Library, the Drawing Room, the Billiard Room each are themed in a different European period. The 1907 addition of a private railcar — Railcar No. 91 — sits in a glass pavilion on the south lawn, restored to its original condition (Flagler died in this car in May 1913 after a fall down a marble staircase at Whitehall). Mary Lily died in 1917. Her heirs sold Whitehall in 1925 to a developer who tacked a 10-story hotel tower onto the back. By 1959 the property was condemned. Flagler's granddaughter Jean Flagler Matthews bought it, demolished the hotel tower, restored the original house, and opened it as a museum in 1960. The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum has been a National Historic Landmark since 2000.
If you fly a Piper — Cherokee, Warrior, Archer, Seminole, or M-class turboprop — your airplane was likely born at this facility adjacent to Vero Beach Regional Airport. Piper has called Vero Beach home since 1957, and the factory complex is clearly visible from the air as a cluster of hangars and assembly buildings. Completed aircraft in various stages of painting line the ramp. The Piper training center also operates here. For Piper owners, a pilgrimage to Vero Beach is the aviation equivalent of visiting a cathedral.
At 730 square miles, Lake Okeechobee is the largest freshwater lake in the southeastern US — so large that from low altitudes over its center, you cannot see the far shore. Remarkably shallow at an average of 9 feet deep, it is completely encircled by the 143-mile Herbert Hoover Dike, built after the catastrophic 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane that killed over 2,500 people. From the air, the dike appears as an unnatural straight line separating the lake from surrounding sugar cane fields. The lake is the liquid heart of the Everglades ecosystem.