Memory Lane: Dentist with floating office tended to Palm Beachers

Before the advent of automobiles and a network of roads in the area, turn-of-the-20th-century Palm Beachers often relied on boats to get around — and sometimes to get relief from a toothache.

Just hop aboard the “Dentos,” a floating dental office helmed by a genial and gray-mustachioed dentist, Dr. F.H. Houghton, “whose skillful work is well known,” local newspapers assured.

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

The 53-foot Dentos annually visited the Palm Beach area for weeks at a time in the late 1890s and early 1900s as part of Dr. Houghton’s itinerant dental practice traveling from Daytona to Palm Beach and back.

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

Still, dentistry in Florida had come into its own. Dentists, once tradesmen, were trained professionals with degrees after dental schools began opening in the country starting around 1840.

The Florida State Dental Society, formed in 1884, helped usher in the 1887 creation of a state Board of Dental Examiners to set standards, according to the State of Florida Archives.

But even as improvements continued, dentists often had to travel to their patients who lived far away from large towns.

Before the idea of a floating dental office came to Houghton, “my means of reaching people … (was) by rail or steamer, necessitating the loss of valuable time in transit and packing and unpacking outfit,” he wrote for a trade journal in 1898.

The Dentos was custom-built — with 16,000 feet of cypress, Georgia pine and other lumber — according to Houghton’s specifications.

The yacht featured a large reception room, modern plumbing, brass and bronze fastenings, bathrooms with marble washstands, and an operating room with a dental chair. The doctor said he spent “several thousand dollars” on the vessel.

Houghton, who summered in Westerville, Ohio and maintained a Daytona dental office, put Dentos in service in 1897, traveling along the Halifax, Hillsborough and Indian rivers and then farther south.

To serve Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, where the first dentist in the area was Dr. J.A. Pugh, the Dentos stopped at various places, but Houghton often tied up for weeks at the pier of the now-long-gone Holland House hotel in downtown West Palm Beach.

The hotel, on Evernia Street and what would later become Flagler Drive, was popular with winter visitors and was owned for 20 years by Lewis Lockwood.

Lockwood’s son, L. Trevette Lockwood, served as the Town of Palm Beach’s manager from 1922 until his death in the early 1950s.

Houghton insisted he used modern methods on his boat to “meet the demands of an intelligent people.”

“On several occasions I have operated at the chair for patients in transit (and) it is truly novel and like a dream,” he wrote in 1903. “As you look from the window and view the stately palm trees and other tropical plants … I can truly say there is nothing monotonous about life on the Dentos,” including “the passing … of numerous launches, both steam and naptha, interspersed with the white wings of sailing yachts.”

By 1906, according to then-newspaper accounts, another dentist, Dr. J. Edward Urich, led day-to-day operations of the Dentos; he’d continue to do so through at least 1911.

Urich’s stewardship of the Dentos came as Dr. Houghton’s permanent office in Daytona had become increasingly busy. Florida’s coastal populations continued to grow, soon supporting their own resident dentists.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Custom-built floating dental office provided relief for toothaches and more