Loxahatchee Groves became a town in 2006, the 38th municipality in Palm Beach County. On Sunday, Nov. 8, it marks 20 years of incorporation, and the nation's 250th birthday along with it, with a parade down to Loxahatchee Groves Park and a three-hour celebration that honors the community's veterans.

The day

The celebration runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Loxahatchee Groves Park, 13901 Southern Blvd., according to the Town of Loxahatchee Groves event listing. The town describes a day of family activities and patriotic festivities, with special recognitions for veterans, and invites residents to celebrate the town's history and look ahead to its future.

A parade comes first. It starts at the Southern Palm Bed and Breakfast and ends at the park shortly before the celebration begins. The town notes that it lists the parade for awareness and is not its sponsor or organizer.

How a farm settlement became a town

The history goes back more than a century, and the Historical Society of Palm Beach County lays it out on its Loxahatchee Groves community page.

In 1902, the Southern States Land and Timber Company bought about two million acres of Florida for 25 cents an acre, this land among it. When the West Palm Beach Canal, known today as the C-51, was finished in 1917, the company's sales manager, George Frederick Bensel, saw a farming community in it. Company engineer T. G. Thorgesen spent about three years making the first topographical map of the area, and Bensel, Thorgesen and others formed the Palm Beach Loxahatchee Company, which bought 6,500 acres known as Loxahatchee Farms.

The company cut nearly 30 miles of parallel canals and roads, and a drainage district was formed to keep them up; it is the forerunner of today's Loxahatchee Groves Water Control District. By 1924 the road beside the canal had become Southern Boulevard. A grocery, a gas station and a post office opened in 1925. Citrus and tomatoes were the crops, and fruit went out by a small railroad from a packinghouse. Thomas Keats Bensel, George's brother, started a citrus project that led to 56,000 more trees being planted.

The 1928 hurricane knocked nearly every house in the settlement off its foundation; the Thorgesen house was the exception. Farming carried on into the 1930s, and the citrus and tomato operations, later run by George Bensel's son and grandson, wound down after his death in 1961.

Love it and leave it alone

The modern town grew out of a determination to stay rural. The Loxahatchee Groves Landowners Association, formed in 1969, adopted the motto Love it and leave it alone and discouraged streetlights, sewers and paved roads. When Wellington and The Acreage grew up around it in the 1980s and 1990s, residents moved to protect that way of life, and in 2006 they incorporated. The historical society calls it the oldest of the county's western communities, and the area has long gone by the nickname Florida's Last Frontier.

If you go

  • When: Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with the parade arriving just before.
  • Where: Loxahatchee Groves Park, 13901 Southern Blvd., Loxahatchee.
  • Questions: Loxahatchee Groves Town Hall, 155 F Road, 561-793-2418.

Sources