Frenchman's Creek Golf Course Community and Country Club History, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

Palm Beach Post Times, by Eliot Kleinberg

Cornwall juts out where the English Channel meets the North Atlantic. It's infamous for its vicious winters, but its summers are legendary and it's a popular getaway for harried Londoners. Early in the 20th century, one such family included a little girl named Daphne du Maurier. She would become a famed British author. One of her novels, Frenchman's Creek, tells the story of a French pirate on the run who finds refuge in a small Cornway waterway and later wins the heart of a local lady. Moved to Northern Palm Beach County in 1935, the pioneer Hoyt family bought land on North Prosperity Farms Road near the intracoastal Waterway. They were attracted to a fresh water basin and a hurricane haven for boats. By the 1940's, the family owned much of the area, then known as Paradise Port.

In the later 1940's, federal surveyors found a small wooden sign that one of the Hoyt children, Billy Hoyt, had placed on a small creek. It turned out the children had informally named the stream for one of their mother's favorite novels: Du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek. The name became official and still marks the small waterway that runs behind Leeward Road in the Frenchman's Creek neighborhood and connects to Frenchman's Marina.

(Information provided by the POA and Lake Park Historian Dorothy Borden Gooding).