Profitable ventures always appealed to John Clarke. As the son of Palm Beach pioneer Charles Clarke, he had the means to invest in them. There he planted a grove and built a packing house to prepare the fruit for shipment to northern cities. By , business was thriving from Cape Canaveral to the Keys, but a blight destroyed most of the crops the following year.
When the line extended to Key West in , Cuban pineapples could be loaded and shipped to northern markets more economically. By , Clarke, like most others, had abandoned his fields. He and his brother had designed and were building the first shaft-driven car at their plant in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.
Business never permitted John to spend an entire season with his family in Palm Beach. When he was here, the land provided him a place to do what he loved best. An avid fisherman, he could escape the pressures of business catching all the bass and bream he wanted in a lake on the western edge of his land. With his wonderful sense of humor, Clarke jokingly named the lake after himself because there was no one around at the time that particularly cared what it was called, Lake Clarke simply became accepted.
He honestly believed that the Everglades could be drained by cutting a few canals from Lake Okeechobee to the ocean. Any land exposed due to drainage would become state property and could be sold to increase state revenue. He convinced the legislature to pass a comprehensive drainage law. For produce and sugar growers in the Glades, it did provide the only direct route between the coastal and western sections of Palm Beach County, but it also forever altered Lake Clarke.
When the locks were opened at the spillway between Lake Worth and West Palm Beach, water levels in the lake were lowered by approximately eight feet leaving only the deepest areas intact. Most of what remained was only one to two feet deep, and within a few short years, weeds and rushes clogged most of that. No longer the clear clean lake John Clarke had known, most of the area transformed into a marshy sanctuary for life attuned to that environment: alligators, ducks, dove, quail, herons, owls, raccoons, frogs, snakes, and insects.
