March 29, 2024

Pages from the Past: Aug. 1982

'The Great Developer' Brought Civilization to a Swamp

WJ. “Fingy’ Conners built a highway that brought development to South Florida.

Gene Burnett | 6/1/2008

Car on Tamiami Trail
Even the Tamiami Trail, shown here in 1927, was a primitive route when Conners built his highway through the Florida swamps.
He put a road over one of the most “impossible” swamp-choked terrains in Florida, from West Palm Beach to Okeechobee City, bringing in 1924 the first highway linkup to the state’s west coast.

And he did it faster than you could say — well, corned beef and cabbage. Because, although his name was W.J. “Fingy” Conners, most people could only think of him as Jiggs, of the famous George McManus comic strip characters, Maggie and Jiggs, in “Bringing Up Father.” Reliable but unofficial sources swore he was the real-life model for Jiggs, who was born of a star- crossed romance. McManus would not — probably could not — confirm it. On query, Conners would only smile and say nothing — but he never denied it.

At all events, the 52-mile toll road was certainly an engineering feat and, when a jubilant throng of 15,000 gathered for the ribbon-cutting festivities in Okeechobee City on July 4, 1924, “Fingy,” alias “Jiggs,” was hailed by Gov. Gary Hardee as “The Great Developer,” a peer of Henry Plant and Henry Flagler. Others even compared Fingy to Appius Claudius, Charlemagne and St. Patrick. Fingy, in response, could only call it the kind of “damn fool thing” that had made him a millionaire in the first place.

But in that era of manic grandiosity, the 1920s Florida Land Boom, the highway was surely a fit subject for gushing. And authorities agreed that Conners had done for the Lake Okeechobee region what no one had done before — he had brought Ford’s “Tin Lizzie” to the lake shore and had advanced the area’s development by 25 years.

But Fingy Conners himself seemed to fit like a native son into the rough and primitive Okeechobeeland of that day. Historians A.J. and Kathryn Hanna said his “fighting record” surpassed that of legendary sheriff “Pogy Bill” Collins; his boldness made John Ashley of the notorious Ashley gang “look anemic;” his Everglades vision exceeded that of even Coy. Napoleon Broward; he invested more in the region than Richard Bolles; and his language had the salt and color of a Lake Okeechobee catfisherman.

As for his “Jiggs” role, the Hannas’ research, to them, seemed certain. “The likeness — physical and otherwise — between Fingy and Jiggs is startling,” they noted. And, they said, he had the kind of appeal that had put Jiggs into more than 750 papers worldwide, in 27 different languages from the 1920s to the 1950s. Okeechobee historian Lawrence Will reported that a young Buffalo, New York, artist (McManus) fell in love and sought to marry millionaire Conners’ daughter. Conners didn’t object, but his society- minded spouse, finding McManus shy of Social Register connections, squelched the romance. In revenge, McManus created the shrewish “Maggie,” whom the harried Jiggs was forever eluding to sneak off to Dinty Moore’s saloon for corned beef and cabbage or a peaceful poker game. And Fingy was a ringer for Jiggs, right down to his corned beef-and-cabbage diet.

Fingy Conners began his career as a cabin boy on the Great Lakes and then fought and scrapped his way to leadership over the Buffalo dockworkers. (A hand injury in one such fight accounts for the nickname Fingy). He then made a meteoric rise in maritime and other interests and was soon a young multimillionaire. Whereupon he and “socialite” Maggie came to Palm Beach where he proceeded to spend his money as hard as he had earned it.

Then, in 1917, at a dinner celebrating the opening of the West Palm Beach Canal to Lake Okeechobee, Conners’ interest in the Everglades region was sparked and he took tour through the canal. He immediately invested a large sum for two large tracts east of the lake, naming one of them Connersville, and tried to make them”showcase” farms. But his agricultural methods were limited and ineffective and both projects failed. Next, he bought up over 12,000 acres northward along the east lake shore for about $700,000 and then purchased most of Okeechobee City and its vast farm tracts nearby.

To attract buyers into these vast holdings, he proposed building paved road to the lake shore, citing the region as “the greatest place on earth, unlimited opportunities for development . . . nothing like it on earth.”

The Legislature apparently agreed, for it took them only two hours and 20 minutes to enact a law authorizing Conners to build a toll road 19 miles along the West Palm Beach Canal, from Twenty Mile Bend to the lake, and then 33 miles around the lake shore to Okeechobee City. It would be the first south- central connection with state roads leading to Tampa and St. Petersburg.

In the fall of 1923, Conners met trouble-shooting engineer, R.Y. Patterson (who was later vice president of the U.S. Sugar Corp. in Clewiston), and hired him at once. But the $2 million project looked formidable if not forbidding — and Conners wanted it done as fast as possible.

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