South Dade History

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In 1955, my parents, Marcia and Dr. Frank Kenward, moved from Indiana into their new home on Killian Drive and 60th Court in unincorporated East Kendall, Florida, now the Village of Pinecrest.  Our nearest neighbor was three blocks away and aside from the grid of streets, avenues and courts, we lived in a forest of Dade County pine and saw palmetto.

The neighborhood grew up fast and by the time I entered first grade at Pinecrest Elementary School in 1960, the empty blocks were full of new ranch style homes and families.

We learned about the history of Florida, Miami, Henry Flagler, Julia Tuttle and Mary Brickell in grade school, but nothing of our neighborhood, some 15 miles south of downtown, with a character and history of its own.

During the 2008 Great Recession, I found myself with a little extra time on my hands and decided to compile whatever I could find about the history of Kendall, and more specifically, Pinecrest.

A few months of research and some very fortunate interviews with some longtime residents of the neighborhood led me to write a series of articles for the Pinecrest Tribune, a community newspaper.  A compilation of these articles was subsequently published in the 2011 edition of Tequesta, The Journal of HistoryMiami.

This is the story of the people and events that began to shape the Kendall suburb of Miami, now home to 80,000 residents, the area's first tourist attraction, The Rare Bird Farm, and the settlement of Flagler Grove in 1904, in what 92 years later will become the Village of Pinecrest.