Adams Key
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 took its toll on Fisher and his partners’ investment who sold the island to Garfield Wood in 1934. Garfield “Gar” Wood was a professional speed boat racer and the first man ever recorded achieving a speed greater than 100 mph across the water. Wood retired from boat racing in 1933 and purchased the Adams Key property for use as a private retreat.
Fisher would go on to build Key Largo’s Caribbean Club made so famous in the Bogart and Bacall classic movie Key Largo. Adams Key would be sold again in 1954, this time to Bebe Rebozo, a friend of President Richard Nixon. Nixon would be one of four presidents to visit the island. The others were the aforementioned Harding, Herbert Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson. John F. Kennedy, too, would visit the club, though at the time he was still a Massachusetts senator. Rebozo would sell the 77-acre property to the National Parks Service in the 1960s for $330,000 and would become part of the Biscayne National Monument, known today as Biscayne National Park. In 1974, the main building once known as the Cocolobo Cay Club burned down. The rest of the property was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Historically the island was known as Cocolobo Key, named for a native fruit tree, Coccolobo diversifolia, related to the sea grape. The medium-sized tree produces a small, fleshy fruit favored by indigenous pigeons, among other species, and more commonly known as pigeon plumb.