Valparaiso’s 6400 residents live at the "back door" of Eglin Air Force Base, the East gate. Niceville borders Valparaiso on the North and Boggy Bayou on the East. The City is cut in two by Tom’s Bayou, which juts off from Boggy.
All of the area from Shalimar to Rocky Bayou including the land that is now Eglin AFB proper belonged to the nearly 16,000 acres of timber aquired by Allen Brown in 1901. Several turpentine mills were in the Niceville area. A sawmill was in Valparaiso, the small settlement on the North side of Tom’s Bayou.
The entire acreage was purchased in 1909 from the late Mr. Brown’s estate for $800 by the Consolidated Land and Lumber Company. John B. Perrine, who first visited the area in 1890, returned to the "Vale of Paradise" in 1918, 28 years after his boyhood vow to settle there. He was apparently still enthralled. He purchased the old Allen Brown property and envisioned a vast livestock and crop farm, and a city of 60,000 people. He founded the Valparaiso Development Company and began to follow through with his planned community. It nearly worked, except that Mr. Perrine died suddenly in 1921. Shortly after that, the state legislature granted the City a charter.
The VDC fell on hard times and was forced into bankruptcy. The land was then bought by Mr. James E. Plew, a Chicago financier. Mr. Plew soon had many enterprises going and demonstrated his versatility in many ways: Businessman, inventor and aviation enthusiast, to name a few. He originally studied medicine as well as business. With his leadership, and the famous Valparaiso Inn, Valparaiso’s population and prosperity slowly grew.
In 1935, for the yearly sum of $1.00, Plew leased 137 acres of land South of Tom’s Bayou to the City of Valparaiso on which to build an airport. The Florida Department of Transportation paved the runways with the brand new mix-in-place asphalting process, developed by Mr. F. E. Mitchell, former Valparaiso resident.
This was to become the nucleus of Eglin Air Force Base. An additional 340,000 acres of Forest Service land was made available by the Government for test ranges and other military uses. Today, Eglin is one of the world’s largest air force installations.
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