How Dreams of Buried Pirate Treasure Enticed Americans to Flock to Florida During the Twenties

“You could put your money in stocks, but everyone knew that the market could go down as well as up,” wrote Christopher Knowlton in his 2020 book, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression. “Florida real estate could only go up, it seemed.”

But even these enticements weren’t always enough. Real estate promoters sometimes found they needed fresh gimmicks to lure buyers to their particular developments. At that point, someone had a solid-gold epiphany: What if the priceless treasures of Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and their pirate peers lay buried beneath the soil, just waiting for the right shovel?

The excitement began building in 1918, when a developer named W.D. McAdoo claimed to have discovered a treasure chest full of Spanish doubloons on an island off St. Petersburg, where he was planning to break ground. The supposed find spurred interest not only in his island but also in a nearby one that developers quickly rechristened Treasure Island—a name the site retains to this day.

A few years later, to promote a resort being built by his brother, architect Addison Mizner, playwright Wilson Mizner and an enterprising publicist “buried some doubloons and some fake relics of Blackbeard in Boca Raton Inlet, [which] were disinterred amid wild excitement,” wrote journalist Alva Johnston in his dual biography of the Mizners.

In 1924, workers digging on another property near Boca Raton that was owned by a different developer reportedly unearthed a cache of 17th- and 18th-century Spanish and English coins. A year later, the developer sold a large tract of land in the area for $1 million (around $18 million today).

But perhaps the most elaborate hoax occurred in December 1925, when the legendary Chicago newsman and future Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht worked a brief stint as a publicist for a developer who hoped to turn the relatively desolate island of Key Largo into a vacation paradise—or at least a bonanza for himself.

As Hecht later told the story, he arranged to borrow a supply of Spanish doubloons from the president of Cuba, then buried the coins in vases he picked up in an antiques shop. Next, he hired a local beachcomber to “discover” the treasure.