Custom made-crafted floating dental business delivered reduction for toothaches and extra

M.M. Cloutier

Prior to the arrival of automobiles and a community of roadways in the area, switch-of-the-20th-century Palm Beachers often relied on boats to get all over — and from time to time to get relief from a toothache.

Just hop aboard the “Dentos,” a floating dental office helmed by a genial and grey-mustachioed dentist, Dr. F.H. Houghton, “whose skillful get the job done is properly recognized,” neighborhood newspapers assured.

“He went up and down the (Florida east) coastline and everyone waited for him,” the late Palm Beacher Marjorie Potter Stewart, daughter of island pioneer George Wells Potter, was quoted as recalling yrs later on.

The founder of the Dentos was Dr. F.H. Houghton, a dentist described as skillful by locals as he treated patients from Daytona to Palm Beach.

The 53-foot Dentos yearly visited the Palm Seashore location for months at a time in the late 1890s and early 1900s as part of Dr. Houghton’s itinerant dental observe traveling from Daytona to Palm Beach and back.

At the time, many small communities along the way didn’t have big enough populations to support a lasting resident dentist.

Nonetheless, dentistry in Florida experienced come into its have. Dentists, once tradesmen, had been trained professionals with degrees after dental colleges started opening in the state setting up all-around 1840.

The Florida Condition Dental Society, fashioned in 1884, served usher in the 1887 generation of a point out Board of Dental Examiners to set standards, according to the Condition of Florida Archives.

But even as advancements ongoing, dentists generally experienced to journey to their sufferers who lived far absent from massive cities.

When in the Palm Beach and West Palm Beach area, the Dentos often tied up at the Holland House hotel located on downtown West Palm's Evernia Street and what would later become Flagler Drive.

Right before the strategy of a floating dental office came to Houghton, “my suggests of achieving men and women … (was) by rail or steamer, necessitating the loss of useful time in transit and packing and unpacking outfit,” he wrote for a trade journal in 1898.

The Dentos was customized-built — with 16,000 toes of cypress, Ga pine and other lumber — in accordance to Houghton’s technical specs.