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Gen. James Patton Anderson Camp 1599
Celebrating 34 Years 1992 - 2026
Munyon’s Island was once home to Hotel Hygeia
April 16, 2010 Eliot Kleinberg's Post Time columns.
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Near North Palm Beach stands the little-known and mostly untouched Munyon’s Island. Originally 15 acres, it was used in the 1930s and 1960s to dump fill from the dredging of the waterway, tripling its size to 45 acres.
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From 1992 to 1997, Palm Beach County restored 20 acres of wetlands. As an environmentally sensitive tract, operated by the state park, visits to it are restricted, and it’s open only by day. Once, rising above the island was the glamorous Hotel Hygeia. Alas, its glory was fleeting. Here’s a 1990 look back by our friend and former colleague, Norv Roggen, who died in 2001:
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No doubt Dr. James Munyon was heartbroken when his Hotel Hygeia on Big Munyon’s Island burned down in 1917. But he would be pleased to know the 21-room structure won’t be forgotten.
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The five-story hotel was a popular overnight stop for boat-traveling tourists in the early 1900s. It was also the distribution point for Munyon’s Paw-Paw tonic, a mixture of sulphur water and papaya juice that sold for $1 a bottle as a cure for dozens of ailments.
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But one night in 1917, tragedy struck Munyon’s utopia.
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The hotel, named after the Greek goddess of health, burned to the ground. Disappointed, Munyon sold the island to New York restaurateur Harry Kelsey, developer of Kelsey City, now Lake Park.
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Later, sand was dredged from the Intracoastal Waterway and dumped there, burying the hotel’s remnants and foundation.
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The North Palm Beach Village Council’s persistence had prevented the building of high-rises that would have obliterated the Munyon hotel site. Billionaire John D. MacArthur acquired the property from Kelsey in 1955 and planned to build a bridge to the island and develop it. The village objected, and after a lengthy court battle, MacArthur gave up when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. After MacArthur’s death in 1975, the state acquired the island.
Dr. James Monroe Munyon was known for homeo-pathic patent medicines, some of which he prom-oted at his Hotel Hygeia on Munyon Island.
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Career
His first career was as a publisher, but he soon moved on to creating homeopathic medicines in the early 1890s. He employed a staff of chemists and physicians, one of them Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. Munyon was found guilty of fraud several times due to unsubstantiated claims for his medicines. Many of his medicines are said to have consisted mostly of sugar and alcohol. His most famous one was named "Dr. Munyon's Paw-Paw Elixir" and its main ingredient was fermented papaya juice. It was served at his resort, Hotel Hygeia, on Munyon Island. At the time his cures were highly regarded with the Philadelphia Times writing that "Professor Munyon is to medicine what Professor Edison is to electricity."
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In 1900, he donated two million dollars to establish an industrial school for fatherless girls in Philadel-
phia, Pennsylvania, donating some of the land near his house. The school provided practical training and its operations were funded by Munyon. His policy was to give at least ten percent of his profit to charity.
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He bought what is now known as Munyon Island in 1901 and completed construction of a hotel in 1903. The hotel was named Hotel Hygeia after the Greek goddess of health and it catered to wealthy north-erners who spent the winters in Palm Beach, Florida. The five-story hotel had twenty-one rooms and eight baths. The hotel burned to the ground in 1917.
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Munyon also owned land in Palm Beach, Florida in an area known as the Styx. He rented out properties there mostly to African-Americans. He used sanitation as a cause to evict all of his 150 tenants in 1906 and later sold the land to Edward R. Bradley.
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Personal
He was married four times and divorced three times. One of his ex-wives, Dora Harvey, authored the 1900 book Half Hour Stories, published by Abbey Press. She was also active in the Merion, PA chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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His third marriage was in 1908 when at the age of 60, he married Pauline Neff Metzger, who was 24 at the time. In 1913 she filed for divorce and returned to her career as an actress. He had two sons. Duke Munyon and James Munyon Jr.
Welcome to Broward County, Florida
Posted on February 22, 2019
CategoriesBroward News
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Before burning down, this island resort promised cure-all elixir and a
fountain of youth. It was one of Florida’s earliest swindles.
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A little more than a hundred years ago, people from up and down the
East Coast would journey to a small island in Lake Worth Lagoon to
down “Dr. Munyon’s Paw-Paw Elixir,” a cure-all said to heal rheum-
atism, nervousness, sleeplessness and a whole host of other maladies.
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There were several problems. James M. Munyon was not a doctor. His
elixir was little more than fermented papaya juice. And the resort from
which he sold it, the Hygeia Hotel on Munyon Island, also offered
a “fountain of youth,” the waters of which were just plain old H2O
pumped into the well through pipes connected to the mainland.
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We were turned on to one of South Florida’s earliest and more successful snake-oil salesmen as part of our Sound Off South Florida project, in which we investigate answers to questions submitted by you, our readers.
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Recently, we delved into Florida history to answer the question, “Are Pine Island and Rock Island roads named after actual islands?” And we draw water again from that historical well, as reader Robert Boggy wrote in to ask, “What do we know about the hotel/bar on stilts that housed/fed commercial fisherman and blue collars that burned down (early 1900s) Munyon Island?”
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After researching, there were a couple issues with the premise of the question. Munyon’s resort hotel was a five-story, high-end affair that catered largely to wealthy northerners, not local fishermen. Also, the place wasn’t on stilts. But it did burn down in 1917, with Munyon dying a year later, capping off a several-decade career in flimflammery.
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What’s now known as Munyon Island was first settled by Nathan and Carrie Pitts in 1892, according to records held by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. At about the same time, Munyon was beginning his career in “homeopathic remedies” in Philadelphia.
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The Pitts had moved from Massachusetts to Ormond, Fla., in 1876 due to Carrie’s failing health. There, Nathan Pitts “soon made his worth known, being closely identified with all matters of public improvement,” according to a 1902 obituary published in The Tropical Sun, South Florida’s first newspaper.
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In a moment of land speculation awesome even in the history of South Florida, Pitts bought five acres on the west shore of Lake Worth for $2 in the winter of either 1887 or 1888 and sold it in 1891 for $3,500. The next year, he bought all of what became Munyon Island from the U.S. government, according to “A Tropical Frontier,” a history of early Florida settlement published in 2005.
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Up until that point, what was then called Pitts Island, had been uninhabited — or at least unsurveyed. An 1896 history of the area, “The Lake Worth Historian,” tells a different, more colorful story, explaining that Pitts bought the island “from an old hermit by the name of Rogers, who had lived a Robinson Crusoe existence on a little clearing of its almost impervious thicket under the dense shade of a huge banyan tree.”
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Either way, Pitts built a little hotel on the island in 1901 before selling to Munyon, who had much grander plans. His five-story Hygeia Hotel, named for the Greek goddess of health, included resort and spa activities, the aforementioned “fountain of youth,” and a seemingly never-ending supply of Munyon’s Paw-Paw Elixir.
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The snake-oil salesman then began his ad campaign, a blitz of full-page ads in East Coast newspapers declaring the healing powers of his elixir. The marketing of the resort and its elixir went so far as to include an official song, penned by Munyon, entitled “Down Where the Paw-Paw Grows,” the last verse of which went: “Munyon’s Isle all hearts beguile/Down where the paw-paw grows/There’s joy for each at gay Palm Beach/Down where the paw-paw grows.”​
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Munyon laid out his grand plans for the island in a contemporaneous newspaper account, saying, “Before long we will have gondolas, sailing the waters around the island and passing under Japanese bridges and Venetian columns. … People from all over the world will come here to enjoy the climate and drink from my fountain of youth.”
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In 1913, Munyon’s son Duke went into business with him, according to a Tropical Sun article, and the massive expansion of the hotel began. Duke “formed a syndicate of northern capitalists” who paid to clear land on the north end of the island to build private winter homes for the wealthy, according to the article.
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But those plans never came to fruition. The Hygeia Hotel burned down in 1917, and Munyon died the next year. Harry Kelsey, later the developer of Lake Park, bought the island from the Munyon estate for $65,000 in promissory notes, and was then sued by the estate in 1926 for nonpayment. The island was foreclosed on and returned to Munyon’s estate, and was sold again in 1932, after which it was used to dump sand dredged from the Intracoastal, eventually more than doubling the size of the 15-acre island.
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Munyon Island came into the possession of John D. MacArthur in the 1950s, and from there was bought from his estate by the state of Florida as part of what became John D. MacArthur State Park.
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Today, the island makes for a great kayaking excursion, but the foundation and anything else that remains of Munyon’s resort has long since been buried by time and tons of sand.
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Jane's History Nook
A different look at the history and people of Fort Lauderdale,
Miami, Palm Beach and neighboring towns. (Not a news site)
Friday, December 9, 2022
By Jane Feehan
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James M. Munyon (1848-1918) may be as interesting as the island
in Lake Worth Lagoon bearing his name. A patent medicine man,
Munyon’s tale is one of self-promotion, advertising savvy and
knowing an audience seeking alternatives to traditional medical
practice. Today, his life would probably be fodder for tabloids or
Twitter.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Munyon worked at a textile
company and followed it with a successful stint as a booking agent,
according to an obituary. One of his first solo business ventures
(after spending all his saved funds on travel and sightseeing) was
buying starch in Chicago, labeling it as “imported from China.”
He sold it to customers who used Chinese laundries. Munyon was
21
at the time.
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After the starch business he founded Munyon’s Illustrated World
in 1884, a publication “devoted to labor unions.” He changed the
publicati on’s name to Munyon’s: A Monthly Magazine in 1887.
Copies of the periodical do not exist, but poet Walter Whitman
wrote in his notebooks that two poems and an essay were pub-
lished in the magazine.
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“Money Munyon,” as friends then referred to him, moved from publishing to the patent medicine business in 1891. It was reported that he said he was drawn to this business as a result of a cure he took for rheumatism.
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He opened a factory, Munyon Laboratories, in Philadelphia at 54th and Jefferson (near his home) to manufacture other “cures.” He advertised extensively—so much so, his investors allegedly called him crazy. Munyon bought back their shares in his company, Munyon Homeopathic Remedies*, and moved on alone. His advertising paid off; the homeopathic venture was a huge success across the northeastern U.S. and even in London, England.
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Meanwhile, Florida was beginning to appeal to the monied class during the late 1800s, especially after Henry M. Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway. Wealthy visitors made Palm Beach a high-society winter gathering place after the railway could deliver passengers to the new town. Munyon was one of them.
Seeking a new market for his products, he bought a small island on the west side of the Lake Worth Lagoon owned by Nathan Pitts, a resident of the five-acre island since the 1880s.
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Munyon built the five-story Hotel Hygeia on his island and advertised to wealthy prospects in the North about an assortment of cures supplied by island waters. He suggested this could be a fountain of youth. Truthfully, there was no magic water; it was piped in from the mainland. But Munyon’s products such as the popular Munyon’s Paw-Paw Elixir were also available at the hotel. Munyon and his son, Duke, ran the hotel until it burned down in 1917. Munyon died a year later at 70. He collapsed as he sat down for dinner at the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach. Cause of death was thought to be a heart attack.
Munyon married three times (some sources say married four times and
divorced three). The last wife was the beautiful actress, Pauline Neff
(1885-1951). It was a rocky, highly publicized union that ended in 1914 or
1916. She was about 35 years younger than Munyon.
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One of their squabbles was covered by the Tropical Sun in Miami June
1910. The news was gathered from Northern newspapers. The two had a
fight in the presence of “hundreds of spectators” near the Philadelphia
city hall as the couple set off for Washington. “Mrs. Munyon was seen
shoving and striking her spouse with a hard blow” and throwing things
out of their car, including a hat. Witnesses “rubbed their eyes to make
sure what they saw had not been a rapid-fire of moving picture scenes
from a five-cent movie.”
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Munyon had two sons, Duke and James M. Munyon Jr. from a previous marriage. The elder Munyon died a millionaire and left $10,000 to a “comely young woman” who worked for his company. As Munyon’s advertisements stated, “there is always hope.”
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In decades following his death, Munyon Island grew to 21 acres through dredging its surrounds. It is now part of the John D. MacArthur Beach State Park and is accessible via canoe, kayak or paddle board. Its wetlands were restored since the late 1970s and the island lies in a natural state where visitors can fish. Nothing remains of the old hotel, only the name of this “picturesque figure known for matrimonial difficulties” and making money.
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Construction commences on Hotel Hygeia,