'The Great Developer' Brought Civilization to a Swamp
 Even the Tamiami Trail, shown here in 1927, was a primitive route when Conners built his highway through the Florida swamps. |
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.
Patterson’s challenge was to try to build a highway on soft muck over normally inaccessible route where foundation and drainage conditions were unknown. But he was up to it. For the east-west route, he excavated the canal bottom for wet marl. Rocks compressed muck to half its five- foot depth; on this he laid the 24-foot roadbed. For the lake shore route — much of it under water — he threw up a tight mix of sand and muck, then spread over it a deep layer of crusher-run rock, a high grade lime rock from the St. Lucie canal, and topped it with an oil application. To haul the rock from the canal, three-foot gauge rails were laid on the center of the roadbed, side tracks were put down every two miles, with telephones that could connect to eight locomotives. This enabled the dispatcher to keep operations running round-the- clock. This triple-frenetic pace saw the last rock dumped on June 23, 1924; the remarkable feat took only eight months.
Engineering News-Record declared the Conners Highway as one of the fourteen outstanding engineering achievements in North America for 1924. The area was jubilant — and so was Fingy. A celebration was in order and it duly took place in Okeechobee City the following July 4th. Airplanes performed stunts over West Palm Beach, dropping 30,000 leaflets publicizing the ribboncutting. Okeechobee City was festooned with decorations while cowboys, Indians and celebrities were joined by a caravan of 2,000 cars coming in on the new road. “The barriers of America’s last frontier . . . fell here today,” declared the Palm Beach Post, mixed with other statewide press accolades. For Fingy himself, it was his “happiest day.”
Needless to say, the road prospered with a daily average toll take of over $2,000. Fingy also cleaned up by selling lake shore and farm land — with sales of up to a million dollars a month the first year, following a nationwide promotional campaign. He would thereby handily survive the boom’s bust in 1926; most of his land would be sold by the time he died on Oct. 5, 1929.
The region prospered, too, and folks around the lake would long remember the wonderful “damn-fool thing” he did for them — at least they would every time they glanced at the comic strips and saw Fingy’s redoubtable alter ego — Jiggs himself.