The short, simple answer to your question is that savory pies are very popular in the US, just maybe not in the part of Florida you live.

Aside from the much more well-known chicken pot pie, you also have the good ol' Natchitoches meat pie (which is actually one of the official state foods of Louisiana), and the French-Canadian meat pie popular in Quebec and New Brunswick. Also, depending on whether you define the Caribbean as North America or not, there are also Jamaican beef patties - which are also very popular here in NYC - and an array of empanadas from all across the Spanish speaking portions of the continent. And these are just a few - I'm certain that there are plenty of others in regional cuisines that I am overlooking.

So, the better question is not why are savory pies not popular in the US, but instead why are dessert pies LESS popular in Europe. And the answer, to put it simply, is sugar.

As it turns out, throughout the 1700s and into the 1800s sweet and savory pies were neck and neck in terms of popularity on this side of the pond. Sweet pies in the US exploded in popularity, however, during the early/mid 19th century when the establishment of a mainland US sugar refining industry meant the average American could easily and cheaply get their hands on as much sugar as they wanted while their European counterparts were still paying hefty import sums. This easy access to sugar led to an explosion not just in pie making, but also in the creation of jellies, jams, etc.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Hopefully this helped answer your question. If not, let me know and I'll do my best to elaborate more.

References:

Gross, Rachel E. “How Did Pie Evolve From a Medieval Crow-Meat Casserole Into America's Favorite Dessert?” Slate Magazine. Slate, March 13, 2015.

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire a Plants Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2014.

It did transfer over. The difference is that U.S. and Canadian cuisine changed in ways that European cuisine didn't, so that savory meat pies took a back seat. Though, of course, they have never gone away completely. Chicken pot pie, and shepherd's pie/cottage pie are found quite commonly in restaurants throughout both countries, and frozen versions can be found in just about any grocery store you walk into.

This was imported from England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere right from the beginning of the settlement of the North American colonies. But first, some clarification. As Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald describe in their book America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, food preparation in the 17th, 18th, and most of the 19th Century was focused on stretching scarce culinary resources as far as they could go. There were no refrigerators, or freezers, and it was much more important then to use every resource you could. As such, pies were a good way to make something better out of ingredients on their own that weren't so great. The cook could, and usually would, use lard instead of butter. The crust could be a mix of wheat flour and other flours, like rye, whatever was available. And the filling was often a mix between both fruit and meat. While "mincemeat" today usually refers to minced fruits, in the early years of colonial America and after, it could just as readily refer to actual meat derived from an animal, shredded or chopped and sometimes mixed together with fruit.

And the "meat" her wasn't always the good stuff. Umbles (animal innards) were often used, giving rise to the dish, and phrase, "humble pie". Calf foot, cow's tongue, kidney, heart, suet, and other animal bits that weren't always very tasty by themselves, were used as the "meat" in a "meat pie", and minced together with fruit, they could be made more tolerable.

This type of pie was an American tradition going right to the beginning of European settlement in North America. As Sarah Josepha Buell Hale would write in the early American cookbook Good Housekeeper, published in Boston in 1839:

"The custom of eating mince pies at Christmas, like that of plum puddings, was too firmly rooted for the 'Pilgrim fathers' to abolish; so it would be vain for me to attempt it. At Thanksgiving too, they are considered indispensable."

Hale then gives several recipes for such pies, though she complains that they are "expensive" and "unhealthy". Her recipe for "Rich Mince Meat" includes neat's [i.e., calf's] tongue, "beef suet from sirloin," along with raisins and currants. Her recipe for "Plain Mince Pies" includes "lean boiled beef", chopped suet, apples, raisins, and currants. This is followed by a recipe for "Chicken Pie" which includes the de-boned and de-skinned chicken meat, along with "the livers, gizzards, and hearts well seasoned" with gravy and the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs.

Going back a bit further, the first American-original cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, published in Boston in 1796, includes recipes for "beef-flake pie", "lamb pie", "stew pie", "sea pie", "chicken pie", [calf's] "foot pie", "tongue pie", and "minced pie of beef". Some of these are straight up savory pies, while some include the addition of fruits.

Similar recipes would be found in other early American cookbooks. Eliza Leslie's Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats first published before 1830 contains her Philadelphia recipes for "oyster pie" and "beef-steak pie". Mary Randolph's Virginia Housewife published in 1838 contains recipes for a pie of "oysters and sweetbreads", and a "sea pie" that uses "slices of boiled pork or salt beef".

By the mid-19th Century, early restaurant culture had sprung up in New York catering to dockworkers, factory workers, and other urbanites, and surviving despcriptions of the fare offered includes the regular inclusion of meat pies. Most often on offer were mincemeat pies, as well as oyster pies, as descriped in Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Loebel. (19th Century New Yorkers loved oysters.)

This savory pie-eating was also exported to Canada after the Revolutionary War (if not before, by the French). The earliest Ontario cookbook, The Frugal Housewife's Manual, published in 1840, contains a recipe for "mince pies":

"Take two pounds of beef after it is chopped, one pound of sugar, and three pounds of chopped apples, one pound of stoned raisins, half a pound of currants, a glass of brandy, nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon; a little of each is good, but the most of nutmeg is best: moisten with cider, or water with a little vinegar in it."

The invaluable early Canadian history book History of the Settlement of Upper Canada by William Canniff, published in 1869, makes the interesting observation:

"Another dish which seems to have been derived from the Dutch, was Pot Pie, which was always, and is even yet in many places, made to feed the hands at 'bees' and 'raisings', and was generally made to grace the board on a wedding occasion."

It seems that the "pot pie" variation was an innovation--at least in America--of the New York and New Jersey Dutch community. The earliest credited use of the phrase pot pie is in New York author James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, first published in 1823:

"The snow birds are flying round your own door, where you may feed them with crumbs, and shoot enough for a pot-pye, any day."

Savory meat pie were still a staple of the American diet into the late 19th Century. The widely read women's magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, frequently included recipes for meat pies. Among them include an 1879 recipe for oyster pie, 1873 recipes for steak pie and "rump steak and kidney pie", and 1878 recipes for "English pork pie", and a "meat pie" containing rump steak, "game", and bacon.

Moving forward, savory meat pies were still found quite regularly through the early 20th Century. As the New York Public Library's online collection of historic American restaurant menus shows, it wasn't uncommon to find mince pie (1, 2, 3), chicken and ham pie, and chicken and veal pie among others. And their collection mostly consists of the fancier New York restaurants from the 19th and 20th Centuries, like Delmonico's and other upscale restaurants across the country. Assuredly, many of the more working-class restaurants would have had chicken pies, and cottage pies, and the like in this period.

So, what changed. As explained in this earlier answer, by 1870, New Yorkers had several ethnic eating options to choose from beyond traditional English or American cuisine. These included German food, French food, and the beginning of the craze for Italian cuisine, and Jewish and Eastern European cuisine. These same communities had all, to varying degrees, been established in most other major urban centers in the United States by the turn of the century. Certainly, it would have taken longer for them to be established in the still sizable rural communities, and eating out was nowhere near as common in 1900 as it would be a century later. Nevertheless, new dishes began to overtake some of the traditional American ones: German and Polish sausages along with the American innovation the hot dog; the German minced steak known as the hamburger that Americans added a bun to; but perhaps the most direct threat to the prominence of the savory pie was the importance of French haute cuisine in that period. Supper clubs across the country prided themselves on their French fare, as the New York Public Library's collection makes clear. It was at this time, in the early 20th Century, where kitchenware manufacturers and cookbook publishers began to push the idea of the casserole.

By then, with food preservation not such an overwhelming concern, housewives were no longer burderened with stretching the innards of farm animals as far as they would go. Mincemeat could be replaced with the better cuts of meat, and a casserole allowed for a tasty dish that didn't require all the fuss of a crust. As this 1909 syndicated newspaper article shows, a lot of casserole recipes were very much French-ified substitutes for the older English-style meat pies: kidney casserole, oyster casserole, lamb and peas, liver and chestnuts, ham and egg, beefsteak, and others. Many such articles would appear around this time (1, 2, 3, for example).

(cont'd...)

As usual, I'm here to suggest you cross-post this question to /r/askfoodhistorians which isn't quite as well-known but has a much more focused subscriber base.

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!