The Root of Miami

Ashira Morris digs deep into the history of one of South Florida's most storied plants.

The coontie plant grows slowly. Its elegant feather of gloss-green leaves, each coming to a defined soft point, covered much of south Florida for eons. It is an ancient cycad, a dinosaur-era plant present in Florida when Columbian mammoths were stomping through grasslands.Its stem is a promise and a threat: the tuberous “root” is like a lumpy iceberg, the larger part of the plant grows below the surface. It can be processed into flour, providing sustenance in the swamp. But it also contains deadly hydrocyanic acid. 

The Calusa and Tequesta living in Florida were most likely to have figured out how to convert the plant’s toxic tuber into an edible flour. When the Seminole — an amalgamation of other native nations who escaped being forced off their land by learning to live in the inhospitable Florida swamps — were driven south by the U.S. army, they also learned how to process the root. Native Floridians, who figured out how to process the stem and neutralize the poison, named the plant conti — “flour root.” They made disk-like flatbreads from it. When white settlers made Miami their home in the 19th century, the Seminole taught the newcomers about the local flour. Early pioneer families saw the industrial potential, and coontie mills sprung up at locations including Arch Creek and on Biscayne Bay. 

Seminole Woman grinding coontie

For a time, people enjoyed coontie puddings and breads and cakes. In 1912, members of the First Presbyterian Church Miami compiled The Florida Tropical Cookbook, full of recipes from the state’s homestead pioneer wives for how to use the local produce, including coontie. It was published on what, in retrospect, is the edge of a shared sensory memory, a time when people reading it knew the sweet, vanilla-like taste of coontie. 

In their lifetime, it went from a common food item to culinary extinction. 

“Mouths will water in vain,” Mrs. Henry J. Burkhardt warned cookbook readers in 1952, “for slow growth, an antipathy to cultivation, together with the onslaught of bull-dozers in a spreading community, has wiped out coontie as a commercial product.”

As far back as 1835, Miami area residents were recorded selling starch from “a native arrowroot, commonly called coontee,” for eight cents a pound. Unlike the image of the early Florida settler as cattle herder or orange grove planter, the idea of a coontie harvester isn’t exactly part of the local lore — but it was one of the state’s first industries. 

Charles Peacock’s coontie mill

The Seminole method of getting an edible flour from coontie involved pounding the stem in a wood vessel, sometimes a log canoe, then washing it in a series of baskets before baking.

White settlers took that process and industrialized it into mills. Although methods became more technologically advanced as time went on, with steam engines replacing horsepower, the general steps remained the same: the root was soaked and washed and pounded until it was soft and fibrous, with starches separating out. The remaining wet starch was then packed into barrels and washed, stirred, and agitated again. From here, the processed coontie was dried, bagged, and ready for use. A ton of coontie root could make about 200 pounds of flour. 

Milling wasn’t the most profitable at first — "guess I will have to dig coontie" was a refrain of early settlers as a last-resort way to make some money — but by the 1870s, at least eight mills were commercially making coontie flour in the Miami area. By the turn of the century, it became a profitable export crop: coontie flour was the base for a National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) wafer and during World War I, its easily digestible qualities made coontie gruel the ideal food to serve soldiers who were in precarious health after gas poisoning. Coontie flour, marketed as arrowroot flour, was used as a base for biscuits, crackers, and cookies. It even got shipped off to Italy to become spaghetti. 

But first, before the processing, before the shipping, before the baking, you have to dig up the root. And herein lies the problem. 

At the time of the coontie boom, settlers had cleared out Florida’s ancient pine forests, leaving behind stumps and undergrowth. The old-growth coontie was still there, until it wasn’t. The plant doesn’t get much taller than two and a half feet, but the bulbous root underground continues to grow over time, reaching as large as a foot in diameter. Harvesters culled the slow-growing coontie for decades, a singular industrial harvest after centuries of sustainable ones. 

The bulldozers building Miami’s first single-family neighborhoods in the 1920s took care of the rest of the plant’s pineland habitat. In that same decade, the fledgling USDA declared that only starch from the maranta plant could be called arrowroot flour, and the hurricane of 1926 destroyed the remaining mills. 

The coontie industry was over. The plant was nearly eradicated but gained a second life as a landscaping plant. A century later, the cycad has spread from being “rarely seen except in a few gardens whose owners love to preserve native materials, and as impressions in native rock where they have left their fern-like tracery,” as Burkhardt wrote for the Florida Historical Society, to covering ground farther north than its natural range into the Panhandle. The leaves may be a familiar feature of modern landscaping, but it’s what lies beneath that, for a time, created one of Miami’s earliest industries. 

The return of the coontie hasn’t led to a resurgence of people eating it. But it has meant a resurgence of atala hairstreak butterfly. The species nearly went extinct in Florida, since the only food its larva eats is coontie, which allows them to become poisonous like the root. The fate of the butterfly and plant are intertwined, and as more people have put coontie in their yards, the atala has made a comeback.   

Coontie is rarely found in the wild these days, although you might spot it in coastal hammocks. But it’s possible to grow just about anywhere in Florida.

The last time I walked into my native plant store, there was a small basket near the checkout counter with little burnt orange gems: coontie seeds. I took a handful. They’ll grow slowly,  the same way the plant  has for millions of years. 

As I write this, four little coontie seeds are resting on my desk. They’ll grow slowly,  the same way the plant  has for millions of years.