I had the pleasure of helping the former owner of this pool home sell and move in 2023. Located in Sandpiper Bay. Sandpiper is a unique neighborhood and sought after to move to because of the location and no HOA.
THE HISTORY OF SANDPIPER BAY
Courtesy of the Port St Lucie Historical Society
The Early Years
Sandpiper Bay was where General Development Corp. chose to build the first
homes and businesses inside the incorporated city. It is appropriate that what the
City has designated as the Sandpiper Bay Neighborhood includes the location along
the river where a city historical museum is being planned.
The Sandpiper Bay area is also home to much of the history that predates GDC. The Indian Mound in Spruce Bluff, across the North Fork
from Sandpiper Bay, is the first indication there was habitation in the area. Studies of the mound have uncovered few clues, only small fragments, or bone pieces. It was first noted in
1853 by a surveyor surveying for homesteaders under the Armed Occupation Act of 1842.
Some Florida archeologists have said the site may be “pre-ceramic archaic,” meaning it could be 3,000 to 5,000 years old. Anyway, we know the area was occupied by Native Peoples, including the Ais , whom Spanish explorer Jonathan Dickenson described as “cannibalistic” in the 1500s. Over the years a number of indigenous peoples have hunted and fished there, including the Seminoles.
John Enos Fultz Jr. had moved to Florida, at Cocoa, with his family in 1888. His wife died and his house burned down, so he decided to move his family to the west bank of the North Fork of the St. Lucie River in the early 1890s. Others soon followed and he remarried. In September 1891, Fultz petitioned for a post office and the name Spruce Bluff was adopted. For $10 a month he navigated the river back and forth to Stuart, then called Potsdam, to deliver the mail. There settlers grew pineapples and citrus and set up an apiary to collect and sell honey. Their crops were shipped north, notably to Baltimore. Life was tough, men had to find work between crops to support their families. They fished and hunted for deer, wild boar and turkey. The pineapples and other crops came to an end in the severe freezes in the winter of 1894-95. In the late 1890s, William F. and Harley A. Crews came to operate a sawmill near stands of pine or cypress. It would be moved as the trees were depleted. The sawmill brought the first African Americans to the area. In 1896, a school opened, and the teacher boarded with one of the families. Discouraged, most of the families, including Fultz’s, moved to Fort Pierce. When St. Lucie County was carved from Brevard in 1905, Fultz became the first Clerk of the Circuit Court. When he died in 1954, he owned more than 600 acres of the Spruce Bluff area.
Over the years, much of the land that is now Port St. Lucie was bought by ranchers. However, maps of the large ranch holdings do not include the Sandpiper Bay area. It is assumed there were other large landowners in the area as well as smaller farms and ranches. In the early 1930s, a scrawny, ambitious Georgia boy with ancestors going back to the Civil and Revolutionary wars, came down to Florida to sell, repair and test motorboats. Burt Pruitt also liked to fish and soon was building an active guiding business that took him to the St. Lucie Inlet and into the North Fork. Throughout his career, this included many of the rich and sort of famous who frequented Palm Beach.
His story is indicative of the rough-and-tumble frontier lives that were common in the Florida as late as the 1930s and 40s. In the late 30s, Pruitt shot and killed a man he said was trying to steal his wife Cora Leigh and break up his home. Cora Leigh had left with her son for Reno to join her mother. After years of trials and retrials, Pruitt was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1939 for manslaughter. He was not imprisoned for long. By the early 1940s, he was out and building a fishing camp on the east bank of the North Fork, in the area that became a failed development called Tesoro in the early 2000s. It is now known as Rivella.
Bootleggers and moonshiners were still in the woods along the river, and Pruitt probably knew all of them. Pruitt continued to guide fishing trips for visitors and locals hold wild parties at the camp. Wives were not invited, but that did not mean there were no women there. You can imagine what tales he could tell about his customers. This may be why when he shot and killed his mother-in-law and brother-in-law at the camp site and he and Cora Leigh turned themselves in, he spent only a week in jail. His wife had been released immediately. Pruitt said the mother and son were there to kill him, and they probably were. The pair thought, and perhaps knew, he was being abusive to Cora Leigh. A grand jury, made up of local men, decided it was self-defense. By 1962, GDC started asking to buy the 163 acres of wilderness Pruitt owned along the river. By then he was known as a law-abiding citizen and conservationist, in addition to having fishing prowess. He sold the land to GDC in 1968 and stayed on for two years before leaving the camp. He died in 1980 and is buried with his son in Riverview Cemetery in Fort Pierce. Cora Leigh lived until 1998. She was buried next to Burt, but cemetery records show her body was disinterred and sent to Tennessee for reburial. That was at the request of her family.