On a humid morning in the summer of 1896, hundreds of men crowded into a wooden store near the new railroad terminal to vote a city into being. Of the 367 who signed Miami into existence, 162 were Black, a great many of them Bahamian, and without them the count would have fallen short of the number Florida law demanded. The men who cleared the land and cut the rock seawalls were, on paper that afternoon, the founding citizens of Miami.
The story of the Bahamians in Coconut Grove is one of the oldest and least-told origin tales in Florida. Most of those Black voters lived a few miles south, in a settlement of pine cottages and clapboard churches that locals called the West Grove, or the Black Grove. More than a century later their neighborhood is still there, hemmed in now by some of the most expensive real estate in the South.
Coconut Grove: The Place
Coconut Grove sits on the western shore of Biscayne Bay, about six miles south of downtown Miami, and is the city’s oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood. It splits roughly along Grand Avenue and McDonald Street into the affluent waterfront East Grove and the historically Black West Grove, sometimes called Little Bahamas. The housing ranges from million-dollar bayfront estates to the surviving wood-frame “conch” cottages of Charles Avenue. The Metrorail’s Coconut Grove station and the bus lines along Grand Avenue tie it to the rest of Miami-Dade.
How Coconut Grove Became Little Bahamas
Before the Bahamians
Before there was a town, there was a hotel. In 1882 two English immigrants, Charles and Isabella Peacock, opened the Bay View Inn on the bayfront, on the ground that is now Peacock Park. It was the first hotel between Lake Worth and Key West, a wooden building reached mostly by boat, and it needed staff.
The Peacocks recruited workers from the nearest place with people to spare: the Bahamas, an overnight sail across the Gulf Stream. The islands were poor, the soil thin, and the schooner trade between Nassau and South Florida already well worn. For a Bahamian laborer, Coconut Grove was not a foreign country so much as the next island over.
The Bahamians Arrive
One of the first to come was a woman. Mariah Brown, born on the island of Eleuthera around 1851, crossed over in the 1880s to work as a domestic at the Peacock Inn. In 1890 she bought a lot on a sandy lane from a white pioneer named Joseph Frow for fifty dollars and built a small wood-frame house. It was the first house built on that street and stands today as the oldest, raised by one of the Grove’s first Black homeowners.
Others followed the way migrants always have, one letter and one cousin at a time. The lane filled with churches and earned the name Evangelist Street before Frow renamed it Charles Avenue. Many of the newcomers came from Eleuthera and Harbour Island, and they brought a way of building with them: low-pitched roofs, deep porches, and operable sash windows, the “conch house” style carried up from the Bahamas through Key West.
The work was the kind that built a coast. Bahamian men dove for sponges, cleared land, and farmed pineapples and coontie, a native plant ground into starch. When Henry Flagler pushed his Florida East Coast Railroad south to Miami in 1896, Bahamian and Black laborers laid the track and dredged the channels. A generation later, when George Merrick raised Coral Gables next door in the 1920s, it was Bahamian stonemasons who knew how to cut and lay the local oolitic limestone, the coral rock that still faces those houses.
Coconut Grove at Its Peak
No one embodied the settlement’s ambition like Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup. Born near Governor’s Harbour, off Eleuthera, in 1873, he reached Key West as a teenager, worked the pineapple fields at Cutler, and settled in Coconut Grove by the late 1890s. He built his own two-story house of Dade County pine on Charles Avenue in 1897. He believed people made better citizens when they owned their homes, and he acted on it: over his lifetime he built about 100 houses, then rented and financed them to Black families so they could buy.
Stirrup ran a grocery, a dry goods store, a meat market, a tailor shop, and a bicycle repair business, and he donated the land for Christ Episcopal Church. By the time he died in 1957, at eighty-four, he was one of the largest landowners in Coconut Grove and is remembered as one of Florida’s first Black millionaires, a fortune made under segregation, on the wrong side of every line the law could draw.
Around the businesses grew a full community. Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church opened in 1895, the oldest Black Baptist congregation in Miami-Dade. There were schools, lodge halls, and a cemetery of bright above-ground tombs. By the 1920s and 1930s the West Grove was a self-contained Bahamian town, formally annexed into Miami in 1925, with its own rhythm of church on Sunday and Junkanoo at Christmas.
The Change
The same segregation that hardened the community also penned it in. For decades Black residents were confined to the West Grove, served by underfunded schools and barred from the beaches and hotels their fathers had built. When integration finally came, it cut both ways. Families who could leave often did, and the businesses along Grand Avenue began to thin.
Then came the thing the founders never had to fear: their land became valuable. Sitting between downtown and the bay, the West Grove turned into a target for developers, and the slow churn of demolitions, evictions, and rising rents began the displacement that defines the neighborhood’s recent history.
The Landmarks of the West Grove
Mariah Brown House (3298 Charles Avenue). The little wood cottage that started it all, built by an Eleuthera-born domestic worker in 1890 and the oldest house on the street, raised by one of the Grove’s first Black homeowners. The city named it a historic site in 1995. It stands boarded today, a landmark that descendants and preservationists are still fighting to save.
E.W.F. Stirrup House (3242 Charles Avenue). Stirrup built this two-story home of Dade County pine in 1897 and lived in it until his death sixty years later. Termite-damaged and nearly lost, it was painstakingly rebuilt by his Simpson-Stirrup descendants, who in 2024 won city approval for a Bahamian-style inn around it, an attempt to make preservation pay for itself.
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church (3515 Douglas Road). Founded in 1895 as St. Agnes and renamed Macedonia in 1922, it is the oldest Black Baptist church in Miami-Dade County. Its congregation, gathered so the founders could clap and shout as they pleased, marked its 130th anniversary in 2025 and still anchors the neighborhood.
Charlotte Jane Memorial Park Cemetery (Charles Avenue, near Douglas Road). Once known simply as the Coconut Grove Bahamian Cemetery, this is where the settlers were buried, in whitewashed above-ground tombs in the island manner. In 1913 five families, the Burrows, Higgs, Reddick, Ross, and Stirrup, bought the land for 140 dollars, and it was later renamed for Stirrup’s wife, Charlotte Jane.
The Peacock Inn site (Peacock Park, McFarlane Road). Nothing of the 1882 hotel remains but the name on the park, yet this is where the whole story began, the kitchen and grounds that drew the first Bahamian workers across the water. It is a ghost landmark hiding in plain sight on the bayfront.
Grand Avenue (from SW 37th Avenue to the bay). The West Grove’s main street, once lined with Bahamian-owned bars and shops and the route of the Goombay Festival. Today it is a contested seam where new mid-rises rise beside long-vacant lots, the front line of the neighborhood’s fight over its own future.
Where the Coconut Grove Bahamians Came From
Most of the early families traced back to the central and northern Bahamas, above all Eleuthera and its small offshore neighbor Harbour Island, with others from Andros, the Abacos, and the lanes of Nassau. These were islands of farmers, fishermen, spongers, and boatbuilders, where land was scarce and the sea was the highway. Crop failures and a stagnant colonial economy pushed people out; the schooner route to Florida and the Peacocks’ steady wages pulled them in.
What they carried over was practical and lasting: the conch house with its deep porch, the Junkanoo street parade, dishes of conch fritters and souse, and the Baptist and Episcopal faith that filled Evangelist Street with churches. The Bahamian community of Coconut Grove was less an immigrant outpost than a transplanted island, set down on the Florida shore. For a parallel Caribbean migration that reshaped a Northern city, see the story of the Jamaicans of Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Coconut Grove Today
The West Grove is in the middle of a slow, painful transformation. A neighborhood that was once roughly 90 percent Black saw that share fall by nearly half by 2020, according to a University of Miami count. Twenty-story towers and boutique developments now press against the old cottage blocks, and home prices have long outrun the families whose grandparents settled here. A plan to replace a complex of Section 8 senior apartments with a tower has come to stand for the whole fight.
The community has not gone quietly. The Coconut Grove Ministerial Alliance, the Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association, and the group known as GRACE filed a federal housing complaint accusing the city of zoning policies that displaced hundreds of residents. At the same time the Goombay Festival, which began on Grand Avenue in 1977 and once drew hundreds of thousands before lapsing, returned in 2022, its Junkanoo drums back on the street where they belong.
The Bahamians who incorporated Miami have outlasted longer odds than these. Coconut Grove was a Caribbean migrant story decades before Miami became famous for them, the same arc that later shaped the Cubans of Little Havana and the Haitians of Little Haiti. As long as the church bells ring on Douglas Road and a single conch cottage stands on Charles Avenue, the founders still have an address in the city they built.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Bahamians settle in Coconut Grove?
The first Bahamians in Coconut Grove came in the 1880s to work at the Bay View Inn, later the Peacock Inn, which opened on the bayfront in 1882. The Bahamas was only an overnight sail away, land at home was scarce, and the hotel offered steady wages. Word spread island to island, and a settlement grew up along Charles Avenue.
Is the West Grove still a Bahamian neighborhood today?
It remains the historic heart of the Bahamians in Coconut Grove, but intense gentrification has reshaped it. A neighborhood once about 90 percent Black saw that share fall by nearly half by 2020. Longtime families, churches, and preservation groups are fighting to keep its Bahamian character alive.
What are the most famous Bahamian landmarks in Coconut Grove?
The best known are the Mariah Brown House at 3298 Charles Avenue, built in 1890, and the E.W.F. Stirrup House at 3242 Charles Avenue, built in 1897. Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1895, is the oldest Black Baptist church in Miami-Dade County. The Charlotte Jane Memorial Park Cemetery holds many of the original settlers.
Where did the Coconut Grove Bahamians come from?
Most came from the central and northern Bahamas, especially the island of Eleuthera and nearby Harbour Island, with others from Andros, the Abacos, and Nassau. They were farmers, fishermen, spongers, and boatbuilders leaving thin soil and a weak colonial economy. They brought conch house architecture, Junkanoo, and their food and faith with them.
When did Bahamians first arrive in Coconut Grove?
Bahamians began arriving in the 1880s, making the Bahamians in Coconut Grove among the very first settlers of the area, well before Miami was incorporated in 1896. In that incorporation vote, 162 of the 367 voters were Black men, a great many of Bahamian descent. Mariah Brown built her house here in 1890, the oldest still standing on Charles Avenue.
If your family’s story passed through Coconut Grove, Eleuthera, or any of the islands whose people built early Miami, it is worth tracing where that journey began and what they carried with them.