Granddad Eller loses out on tens of millions of dollars!
When Granddad Hoyt Eller’s first house started coming apart during the 1926 hurricane, he was able to get his wife and five children, including my 10-year-old father, Marlin, across Dixie highway to J.B. Wiles’ gas station which was constructed of concrete rather than wood. J.B. told me later that it soon became apparent after the storm that the gas station was too crowded. He suggested to my Grandfather Hoyt that maybe Hoyt should buy the gas station. Hoyt agreed, bought the gas station, and thus began the Eller family investments in Deerfield. Meanwhile, J.B. and baby girl Molly temporarily moved north to Boca Raton to stay with friends there.
My Granddad Eller, however, was not satisfied with only owning a gas station. He wanted to farm. So entrepreneur that he was, he located some property west of Deerfield, now known as Quiet Waters Park, and bought it for $1 per acre!
However, there was a problem with farming that particular piece of property. It seemed that when they tried to plow the land and prepare it for planting, the plows were torn up by the extensive amount of rock just beneath the surface. My father, Marlin, 14 at the time, shared with me that it was a big problem trying to keep the plows operating. Eventually they gave up and sold the property to someone else for $15 per acre.
Generations later, I jostled with my Dad about how “wrong” it was for Granddad to sell what is now Quiet Waters Park for $15 per acre. My Dad would then look at me seriously and ask me: “How many investments have you made, son, where you got 15 times your investment when you sold it?” With that I would shut up and be real quiet. I guess Granddad did relatively alright.
However, unbeknown to him, there was a fortune of road rock just beneath the surface on the property he had owned. To make matters even more dramatic, it was the northern end of the limestone formation of road rock beginning in Dade County coming north;meaning that all the roads and highways north of Deerfield, including the Turnpike and I-95, for decades would depend on the rock mined from Granddad’s property, now known as Quiet Waters Park!
Thus tens of millions of dollars of road rock was mined from Granddad’s former property which he sold for only $15 per acre, or about $3,000 total!

David Eller