Some of the loyalists looked down on the original white Bahamians and called them Conchs,[3] possibly because shellfish was a prominent part of their diet.
Bahamians began visiting the Florida Keys in the 18th century to catch turtles, cut timber, and salvage wrecks.
Unlike the situation in Key West and the rest of the Florida Keys, where being Conch became a matter of pride and community identification, Conch was used by outsiders (in particular the residents of West Palm Beach) in a pejorative manner to describe the Bahamian community in Riviera Beach.
As a result, some of the Bahamians in Riviera Beach denied being Conchs when interviewed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Florida Writers Project in the late 1930s.
WPA worker Veronica Huss (with assistance from Stetson Kennedy) and photographer Charles Foster wrote a book on the Conchs and their culture entitled Conch Town, but the WPA chose not to publish it (Foster eventually published an edited version in 1991).