Peanut Island did not exist before 1918. That year, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the Lake Worth Inlet to create a shipping channel for the Port of Palm Beach, and the sand and sediment had to go somewhere. They dumped it in the shallow waters of Lake Worth Lagoon, forming a ten-acre spoil island with no name and no purpose. As the port grew and the channel required repeated maintenance dredging, more material was piled onto the island over the following decades. By the mid-20th century, what had started as a sandbar had swelled to nearly 80 acres. The island was initially called Inlet Island -- a name as bland as its origins. It earned its more memorable name in 1946, when an entrepreneur attempted to launch a peanut oil shipping operation from the island. The business failed almost immediately, but the name stuck.

The most remarkable chapter of Peanut Island's history was hidden for years. In the tense weeks following Kennedy's election in November 1960, the Navy quietly constructed a blast shelter code-named Detachment Hotel. The logic was straightforward: Kennedy spent winters at the family estate on the mainland in Palm Beach, and in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, he needed a survivable refuge within minutes of the compound. The bunker was essentially a 1,500-square-foot Quonset hut buried underground, accessed through a forty-foot corrugated metal tunnel that sloped downward before making a sharp ninety-degree turn to deflect blast force. Inside were a decontamination room with a shower, a ham radio communication station, and enough supplies for a month of grim survival. The shelter was used during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the prospect of nuclear war felt terrifyingly real. After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, the bunker lost its purpose. Its existence was declassified in 1974.

For most of its life, Peanut Island was an afterthought -- a lump of dredge spoil useful mainly to fishermen and adventurous boaters who anchored offshore. That changed with a $13-million renovation completed in 2005, which transformed the island into Peanut Island Park. Palm Beach County added campsites, a fishing pier, a man-made snorkeling reef along the island's north shore, walking paths that encircle the entire island, and shaded picnic areas set among tropical gardens. On weekends, the shallow sandbars on the island's south side draw hundreds of boaters who anchor in waist-deep water for floating parties in the warm current. The island is reachable only by boat -- a short water taxi ride from Riviera Beach -- and that isolation gives it a carefree, castaway feel that belies its proximity to one of Florida's wealthiest communities just across the inlet.

The Kennedy bunker sat largely forgotten until 1998, when the Palm Beach Maritime Museum restored the shelter and opened it to public tours. Visitors could descend through the corrugated tunnel, stand in the decontamination shower, and imagine thirty people crammed into a concrete box while nuclear fire swept the surface above. The tours ran for nearly two decades before the site was closed in October 2017. In 2022, Palm Beach County commissioners voted to take over the facility and restore it again, though the project is expected to take several years. The bunker remains a jarring artifact -- a reminder that for thirteen days in October 1962, the president of the United States may have genuinely contemplated retreating to this tiny island to ride out a nuclear apocalypse. Today, kayakers glide past the entrance without a second glance, paddling toward the snorkeling reef where parrotfish drift over man-made coral.