In Essay No. 11, it was explained how my Dad, Marlin Eller, at age 21, got started in his own manufacturing business in Deerfield in 1937 by buying his father’s machine shop for $900. It was located on Dixie Highway, where the tennis courts are now, across from City Hall. In Essay No. 12, Dad learned the hard way about the importance of getting patents when he saw his rotary seed planter invention scooped up by others.

Dad had developed the seed planter for his largest customer at the time, August H. Butts, of Butts Farm in Boca Raton and his two sons, Harold and Clarence. Butts Road in western Boca Raton is named after them.

When Harold Butts graduated from the University of Florida in 1933, his father already owned and farmed two 640-acre sections of land in Boca Raton. With Harold’s college-educated input, the family was able to grow the farm significantly. They gradually bought another 2,200 acres, and therefore owned and farmed nearly 3,500 acres, some six square miles, in what is now Boca Raton.

Town Center Mall, Boca Raton Square, Royal Oaks Hills, and many other western Boca Raton developments were built on the former land of Butts Farms. Incidentally, to help you visualize him, Harold Butts in his later years was a dead ringer for the patriarch of the Bonanza TV series, Ben Cartwright. He was a striking figure, especially on his horse, which most of the farmers rode in those days.

Dad worked with the Butts family closely and was their primary source for pumps and general machine shop needs. He helped them develop not only their irrigation system, but a number of specialized farm implements to help them grow their crops, which eventually became primarily green beans.

The pictures featured here and the quotes that follow are taken from the Boca Raton Historical Society Pictorial History Book, Edition 1990 by Curl and Johnson: “By building the best in irrigation systems and using the most up-to-date farming methods, the Butts Farm became one of the largest bean producers in Florida. In 1940, the farms regularly employed four hundred workers and added an additional five hundred migrant pickers for harvests. In that year they shipped 134,000 hampers, some three hundred boxcar-loads, from their own loading docks to the northern markets.”

“Harold Butts later said they purchased the additional land to keep other farmers from coming into the market and for the water. Pumps brought water to the cultivated fields from everywhere on the farm. The system was so efficient that the farm could sell surplus water to other farmers.”

Marlin Eller, my father, built those “efficient pumps”, and our company, now known as MWI Corporation / Moving Water Industries, still manufactures them, plus much more-advanced versions.

David Eller