The Sage of Biscayne Bay 65


the recognition of the value of your achievement ... both in Europe
and America. Wherever fresh water bivalves are studied, it is ac-
knowledged that your work began a new era...."18 Ultimately the
museum published a five-hundred-page report on his findings, which
Simpson described as "the first scientific classification of its kind
ever made in this country.""19
 In 1897, Cornelia Couch, Simpson's first wife, died, leaving one
son, Pliny. In 1902, he married Flora Roper, widow of a botanist-
conchologist friend, who had one daughter, Marion.20 South Florida
may have been their mutual fond dream, because later that year,
Flora came to the area to look for possible homesites. Writing in the
Florida State Horticultural Society Bulletin in 1913, Simpson ex-
plained, "I chose [the Lemon City location] after studying Cuba,
Haiti, Jamaica and the Bahamas. These islands have the advantage
of a more tropical climate than South Florida, their soil is generally
richer, but I felt that to them could be applied the lines from the
missionary hymn, 'Where every prospect pleases, and only man is
vile.'"'21 The Simpson property in Lemon City consisted of nine and
one-half acres of mostly pineland, with a small hammock area and
a frontage of six hundred feet on Biscayne Bay. Simpson retired
from the Smithsonian in 1905 at the age of fifty-six, and immediately
moved to Florida. In later life he said with a laugh, "I thought my
work was done then," realizing that it had hardly begun.2
 Simpson's first major accomplishment after settling into his be-
loved new world was building his house. An experienced carpenter,
he designed and built it himself, with the help of his son, Pliny. Only
the heart of durable Dade County pine was used in its construction.
Marion Roper, Simpson's stepdaughter, said in later years that the
home was modeled after a picture of an inn in Honolulu that Simpson
found in a set of books, Our Islands and Their People, published
in 1899.23 In his early book, Ornamental Gardening in Florida,
Simpson, in a characteristically humorous and ironic tone, wrote:

 Some of the best architects in the country have pronounced
 my house an atrocity, and I present it to my readers [in a pho-
 tograph] in order that they may know what an atrocity is and
 be able to distinguish one at sight ... the living part elevated
 well above the ground, a wide, encircling veranda or gallery,
 as it is often called in South Florida and the West Indies, and