Miami Beach Founder Carl Fisher Marries in 1909
Carl Fisher, industrialist, marketing savant, one of the key founders of the City of Miami Beach gets married on October 23, 1909, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Carl Fisher, considered the father of Miami Beach, was an innovative co-founder of the Presto-Lite Company which provided some of the first headlamps for automobiles in the early 1900s. When he and his partner, James Allison, sold the company to Union Carbide in 1913, Fisher became a multi-millionaire with a net worth of $9 million, which would be worth just under $287 million today.
Prior to the sale of his company, 35-year-old Carl Fisher broke off his engagement to another woman to marry Jane Watts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Years later, it was widely reported that Jane Watts was only 15 years old on their wedding day, even in Jane Fisher’s obituary in the Miami Herald, but she was actually 21-years-old in 1909 based on her birthday of November 6, 1887. The wedding ceremony took place on October 23, 1909, in Jane’s family residence at 724 North Capital Avenue.
The wedding was rather hastily planned based on the couple getting their marriage license just two hours prior to the ceremony. Reverend Neil McPherson, pastor of the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, officiated the ceremony which began at noon. Following the wedding, the couple traveled to California, and then Mexico, for their honeymoon.
Carl and Jane Fisher got divorced in 1926 in Paris, France, after a whirlwind and turbulent marriage. Carl got remarried to his secretary, Margaret Eleanor Collier, who he was married to until his death in the late 1930s. Jane remarried and divorced three more times. While Carl Fisher was wealthy beyond his imaginations by the mid-1920s, he was broke and living in an apartment on Miami Beach prior this passing in 1939.
