Anderson’s Corner
In 1911, Silver Palm Drive was a logging road connecting the Everglades to the shipping port of Black Point in South Biscayne Bay. At roughly the midway point, an entrepreneur named William “Popp” Anderson, who worked for railroad magnate Henry Flagler, built a general store that served what became a thriving farming community. The store was the center of a settlement built by the first pioneers to claim homesteads in what was then a hardscrabble wilderness. Designated a historic building by Miami-Dade County in 1981, Anderson’s Corner is part of a larger district made up of other surviving structures from the period, including an old schoolhouse. Anderson’s Corner is also on the National Register of Historic Places. When it first opened, everybody in South Miami-Dade came to Anderson’s Corner. Farmers and lumbermen met there. Housewives shopped there. The two-story country store that later became the highly praised Harvest House restaurant was the farm community’s best known structure. Hurricane Andrew nearly destroyed it and although there have been restoration attempts, the building has been vacant ever since.
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