The Beginning....at least for me ....
The Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm is where most people around here, including me, went to be born back in the 1940’s. I was the second child, the first son, of Marlin and Lorena Horton Eller, both 25 years-old. They brought me home to their Sears RoeBuck pre-fabricated three-bedroom house on the east side of Dixie Highway, a block south of the Hillsboro Canal bridge. I later noticed that the house was made of clapboard wood, painted white, with red shutters and had lots of red flowered poinsettia plants on the perimeter. The house sat on short concrete piles about 18 inches above the ground, which later on provided a good place for me to scoot when playing hide and seek. A white picket fence around the front yard established a boundary between our house, the sidewalk and Dixie Highway. The back yard extended to a small rock road dividing our property from the pine woods in back of the house. Those woods within a few years, with my father’s help, became Pioneer Park.
My sister, Linda, about three-years-old, was always happy to see me, I’m sure. She still is, although she lives in Vero Beach now. My father’s parents, Hoyt and Mattie Gunter Eller, lived across the street in a larger clapboard wood house also painted white.
Grandad Eller brought his wife and five children to Deerfield in 1923 to help build the five-star Boca Raton Hotel. He was a skilled finish carpenter, and Mr. Addison Mizner hired him to do the fancy carpentry work on the columns, ceiling and walls in the main lobby. Grandad’s work is still there beautifying that grand entrance. However, there were no places here for a man with a wife and five children to live, so grandad brought a large tent with him and camped out on the south bank of the Hillsboro canal near Dixie Highway. He and his family lived in that tent until 1926 when the Boca Raton Hotel was finished. He saved his money and built a house on the west side of Dixie Highway directly across from the present day tennis courts.
Grandad’s ancestral Eller family had originated in a little mountain village in Switzerland called Elm, about 40 miles from Zurich. Trying to avoid a religious war going on at the time, they migrated to Germany, to the banks of the Rhine River not too far from Dusseldorf. They started a winery, which is still there, growing some of the best grapes and making some of the finest wines in Germany. However, the family was producing more children than the winery could financially support, so four of the sons enlisted as Hessian mercenary soldiers, and came to America to fight during the American Revolutionary War. After the war they decided to stay in America, with three of them settling in western North Carolina, and a fourth in Illinois. Our old family Bible records indicate the Eller men were quite prolific. By the time the Civil War, or War between the States, occurred in 1860s they had sired enough Eller men to put 63 Confederate soldiers in the field from North Carolina alone, with the highest rank a Captain, coincidentally named David Eller, from Ashe County, North Carolina. The Illinois brother branch of the Eller family, however, fielded a proportional number of Eller Yankee soldiers, including a Colonel Eller.
Generations later Grand-dad Hoyt Eller’s father moved his family south from the mountains of North Carolina to the mountains of North Alabama; and then Granddad moved his family on down to Deerfield , Florida in 1923. (To be continued)
David Eller
This is the first in a series of articles recognizing the 60th Annual Founders’ Day’s Festival taking place February 16, 17 and 18, 2007. If your family resided in Deerfield prior to 1950 please call the Observer. We would love to share your family’s story.