West Palm Beach is a city in and the county chair of Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It is located suddenly to the west of the next-door Palm Beach, which is situated on a barrier island across the Lake Worth Lagoon. The population was 117,415 at the 2020 census. West Palm Beach is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area, which was home to 6,138,333 people in 2020. It is the oldest incorporated municipality in the South Florida area, incorporated as a city two years previously Miami in November 1894. West Palm Beach is located nearly 68 miles (109 km) north of Downtown Miami.

The start of the historic epoch in south Florida is marked by Juan Ponce de León’s first admission with native people in 1513. Europeans found a thriving indigenous population, which they categorized into sever tribes: the Mayaimi in the Lake Okeechobee Basin and the Jaega and Ais people in the East Okeechobee area and on the east coast north of the Tequesta. When the Spanish arrived, there were perhaps not quite 20,000 Native Americans in south Florida. By 1763, when the English gained rule of Florida, the original peoples had everything but been wiped out through war, enslavement, or European diseases.

Other native peoples from Alabama and Georgia moved into Florida in the prematurely 18th century. They were of varied ancestry, but Europeans called them all “Creeks.” In Florida, they were known as the Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. The Seminoles clashed taking into consideration American settlers higher than land and higher than escaped slaves who found refuge in the midst of them. They resisted the government’s efforts to move them to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Between 1818 and 1858, three wars were fought amid Seminoles and the United States government. By 1858, there were completely few Seminoles enduring in Florida.

The area that was to become West Palm Beach was established in the late 1870s and 1880s by a few hundred settlers who called the vicinity “Lake Worth Country.” These settlers were a diverse community from alternative parts of the United States and the world. They included founding families such as the Potters and the Lainharts, who would go on to become leading members of the business community in the fledgling city. The first white settlers in Palm Beach County lived nearly Lake Worth, which at the get older was an enclosed freshwater lake, named after Colonel William Jenkins Worth, who had fought in the Second Seminole War in Florida in 1842. Most settlers engaged in the growing of tropical fruits and vegetables for shipment to the north via Lake Worth and the Indian River. By 1890, the U.S. Census counted exceeding 200 people arranged along Lake Worth in the vicinity of what would become West Palm Beach. The area at this period also boasted a hotel, the “Cocoanut House”, a church, and a broadcast office. The city was platted by Henry Flagler as a community to house the servants working in the two grand hotels upon the neighboring island of Palm Beach, across Lake Worth in 1893, coinciding bearing in mind the beginning of the Florida East Coast railroad. Flagler paid two area settlers, Captain Porter and Louie Hillhouse, a combined sum of $45,000 for the indigenous town’s site, stretching from Clear Lake to Lake Worth.