Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire FLORIDA history - when ALL game was 'fair'

I collected the photos a few years back in attempt to create a vintage Florida scheme of sorts for one of my Ozello homes.

I'm not much of a interior decorator but here is some of what I ended up with.......

I had a local copper sculptor create some pieces for me.. https://coppersculpture.com



A basket of Mullet..




The Jelly Fish lamp in the corner is all hammered copper, the chain saws and other crap sitting about is rather typical for me...lol....


Had to add some color so I had this commissioned by a hot shop, it's a 1/4 scale replica of rather popular glass artists work...Found the boat in an antique shop, it's 4 ft. in length.




Hope this doesn't take away from the flow of the thread, it's just how I came about sitting on all this Ozello historical stuff...when Muffin's thread popped up, I couldn't resist tossin' some of the collection out there.

A great and very interesting thread!

It doesn't appear China or even India has anything on the USA when it comes to child labor practices of the early 1900's

Along the same lines....

MS had an island in the gulf that folks lived on. Early to mid 1900,s. Ferry service. Maybe a cannery?

I’ll have to go back and read up on that. Neat old stuff.

Dunno there’s any difference in the end product. Kids tougher than a walnut shell.

There is one thing that stands out to me with these cannery kids starting at such a young age doing hard manual labor, they learned good work ethic right from the start.

You can have all the education there is to have but if you never learned what good work ethic is all about you are doomed....

Today we probably have more children that are schooled in proper schools and probably higher IQ levels across the board, but I am most sure there are fewer with the stamina and ethics of these children raised in the early 1900's

I'll take a willing hard worker any day over the well schooled know it all's there seems to be such an abundance of today.

Among the best campfire threads ever, tks.

That's a fact.

I'm become intrigued rather easily for all things old and creative engineering accomplishments are by far at the top of my list of interest.
I've studied things such as how homes were built in the far south before air conditioners existed to find it being a easy task, you just have to use common sense and a little ingenuity and modern AC isn't really necessary at all to have a comfortable Florida home.

That being said, I traveled inland about 30 miles east of Ozello one day to kayak the Withlacoochee River to Lake Panasoffkee. There is a channel that ties the river to the lake and I wanted to check it out.

I'm paddling along and I came to a bridge, it was just being used as a foot bridge and it spanned from a small park across the channel to a boat ramp. It'd recently been resurfaced with wood but the base appeared ancient.



I just couldn't figure this thing out, it had obviously been a turnstile of sorts but what for? why? and when?



It was heavy duty, built like a brick schithouse but it had never been electric motor driven, in fact I couldn't see any possible way it could have been turned by any external power source at all.



Well needless to say this truly peaked my curiosity and also cost me a few weeks of research and I found a bit more than I had ever anticipated.........

Lake Panasoffkee
The Town Nature Reclaimed

Panasoffkee is a lake, but it was almost a city. Only by a strange set of circumstances is it still a typical cypress swamp, carpeted by rare jungle flowers and inhabited by birds and wild animals such as are seen in their native habitat by only the barest few Florida tourists.

In the dark, damp muck land just a few feet off State Road 470, alligators snore peacefully on a summer afternoon while high-stepping egret and heron wade the shallow waters preening their white plumes. Limpkin and cormorant perch on the stumps of pier pilings that rotted away three-quarters of a century ago and great flocks of white ibis wheel in unison in the sky, flashing back the bright sunlight. In winter, the lake is home for thousands of wild ducks that feed on the water lilies and hyacinths.

For seven miles west of U.S. 301 at Sumterville, the highway is hard surfaced. For the next ten miles towards Inverness, it remains a sand road, passable by automobiles at slow speeds, but so remote from civilization that it is not unusual to see deer, panther and wild turkey standing on the trail, astonished at the odd interruption.

All of this might have been a metropolis. The Florida Gazetteer of 1887 shows Panasoffkee twice the size of Jacksonville. There was no Miami in those days. Even before that year, however, a settlement existed on the lake. In the earlier 1880's, when the Florida Central Railroad extended south from Wildwood, the first new station stop was at Panasoffkee.



This meant fast, cheap transportation. Bachelor's Lumber Mill hired hundreds of hands and a steamship dragged millions of feet of cypress across the lake to the new railroad yards.



Cypress wasn't the only booming crop. For years, oranges had been hauled to the railroad over a sandy trail that skirted the lake shore. This was expensive, consequently orange prices were high. But with better transportation available, early grove owners had visions of oranges being shipped thousands of miles away, at prices even a workingman could afford.

So thousands of new trees were planted along the lake and on both sides of the outlet, which drains the lake into the Withlacoochee River.

It soon appeared that Panasoffkee would be the orange capital of the world. No other place had so many trees, such cheap, speedy rail service, so moderate a climate.

What was needed, of course, was a city. So the Bachelors, who later owned one of the hotels, and John Conley, who owned one of the stores, began planning. President Cleveland was induced to open a post office. Wide streets were laid out, cypress signs erected at intersections gave the avenues imposing names.
Proposed resort hotels were given choice sites along the lakeshore. Lots were set aside for churches, schools and a city hall. The population grew from a few score to hundreds, then to thousands. Houses went up almost overnight and around the town square were three general stores, two hotels, a drug store, a blacksmith, a barbershop and poolroom. A public park was completed.

When it began to appear that Panasoffkee might be the largest city of peninsular Florida, a delegation went north to entice Yankee capital.

Bankers were invited to come and see the sight of oranges maturing beside next year's blossoms on the same tree in a mild, gentle winter sun. A group of financiers headed by Jay Gould agreed to an inspection, since they were passing nearby on return from a vacation in the Virgin Islands. Revealing and educational entertainment was prepared. They were to be taken on an open-boat trip around the warm lake shore to shoot wild duck and geese while, in the background, they could view groves and groves of juicy, ripe ranges, grapefruit and lemons. Wild turkey, deer and sometimes panther stare in stunned surprise when they see an automobile round a curve and move toward them. Turkeys fly into low brush, deer lope away but often stop for another look, wildcats frequently climb a tree to seek safety.

What might have been a busy city street, Florida Highway 470 West Panasoffkee Outlet Bridge remains a sand trail through a vast, almost unexplored swamp of cypress, scrub pine and palmetto. Came the march morning of the banker's arrival and overnight temperatures fell to near zero. There was a "hard freeze". The top-hatted capitalists stepped from their train and saw trees coated with ice, blossoms covered with sleet.
Indignantly, they drew their Prince Albert coats around them and stomped back to the warmth of the coaches, muttering through muttonchop beards about time wasted chasing foolish, visionary fantasies.



Trees and crops certainly would perish in such a climate! By the time they got back home, they had more compelling problems than Panasoffkee and frost-covered oranges. New York had been isolated by a snowstorm; food was so scarce that officials feared a famine. Philadelphia and Baltimore were also in dire straits. There were fears of serious fires because not even fire-fighting apparatus could be moved through snow-blocked streets.

It was the winter of 1883! And so Panasoffkee slid back to oblivion. Discouraged and impatient young men lost faith in the town and moved to more promising fields. Some buildings burned down with no one lifting a hand to save them. A few of the more imposing homes were towed away to other locations. Weeds and Spanish moss took over the groves.

In 1895 there was another "hard freeze". Now, even the cypress was abandoned, the steamer allowed to rot and sink. Last to go were the cypress street signs which blew down and disappeared while other young men were fighting a war in another tropical jungle half a world away.

Today at Panasoffkee, there are no wide streets, no grand hotels, no imposing homes, no schools, no city hall, no public parks, not even a chamber of commerce. Hardly a trace can be found of the town that once was home to thousands of people fired with a great vision.
Panasoffkee has returned to the wilderness. Many modem maps do not even locate a lake. A few show the paved portion of State Road 470, but do not indicate the unpaved sand road farther west that cuts through a relatively unexplored area. Here is wild land and wild life much as it was centuries before the first white man arrived in America.

Often, wildlife can be seen even along the paved sections of the road. Here too, are half a dozen modest fishing camps, some of which guarantee that bass can be caught every day of the year on artificial lures, and that the limit of wild ducks can be taken in a few hours every day of the season. Several of the camps are located in aged, abandoned orange groves whose moss-covered trees, given up as lost almost three-quarters of a century ago, have refused to die and despite weeds, weather and neglect are still bearing fruit.

The above article by Wayne Homan appeared in Florida Outdoors Magazine in May, 1957

So it appears to me that Lake Panasoffkee's ship had sailed..........and they weren't on it.... ~Jeffa~

Great Post Guys, realy enjoyed it!

I don't know about the hazards of working as a oyster shucker other than me stabbing myself in the hand with a screwdriver once when I tried.

But the textile mills in the south were common places to find child workers in the early 1900's too.

Maybe it made the kids more tuff but there was a down side to it...

Dear Diary,

Today was my very first day at the factory. I turned seven today, and as a coming of age I decided to sign up to work. Unfortunately, it was not exactly as I expected. I wonder if all factories are like this… I was rudely awoken at 5 in the morning. There was no time to eat breakfast, so we were sent to the machines while eating. The breakfast, unlike the promised pancakes and sausages, was some sort of brown slop. It tasted odd, but I was so hungry that I ate it anyways. I expected work to be alright, but the machines really scared me. I was assigned to work a huge machine cloth-making machine, and I had to run up and down it replacing the bobbins. It was amazingly tiring, and I was constantly afraid of getting my bare feet caught in the workings of the machines, for we were not allowed to wear our shoes in the factory. I became more and more terrified after our thirty minute lunch break. It was quite near the end of the day, and the girl who slept next to me the night I arrived was working two machines over. I could see her eyes drooping as her body sunk into exhaustion at the end of the day, and her movements began to slow and slow. She had told me that she had been working for the past three years, and subsequently had developed bad knees and faulty ankle. Suddenly her ankle gave out, and her entire left leg fell into the machine. She began to scream and cry as her leg was crushed in the machinery, and blood spurted over the floor. No on came to help or turned off the machine. I am ever so worried about the people that run this place, and what their intentions are towards us are. We were deployed at 9 pm, and I have just entered the bed I share with my counterpart on the other shift. What a day.

Sincerely,
Jenny

It's said that the smaller boys could fit inside the machines while they were running and were often tasked with lubricating and greasing them so the factories didn't have to shutdown for such maintenance.

Amputations were common place...







They were tuff all right.............

Great thread!
Thanks all

Might be Cat island?

Great thread, back to the top!

What an outstanding thread with some wonderful contributions, thank you Muffin, Jeff, and all.

I want to post a little about Cedar Key along with these other historical tales.
Cedar Key is just north of Ozello where the OP's family had homesteaded in the 1800's and much like Ozello, it was a busy coastal community with some interesting history.

Cedar Key, Florida, 1884

Problem is, I can't go from my Ozello home to Cedar Key without passing through what was once the town of Rosewood Florida, and it just wouldn't be right to leave it's story out of this thread.............

Rosewood massacre a harrowing tale of racism and the road toward reparations

On New Year’s Day 1923 a white woman was beaten and residents of Sumner, Florida, claimed her assailant was black – which sparked race riots where the casualties were mostly black and hate wiped out a prosperous town

The ruins of the two-story shanty near Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 where black residents barricaded themselves and fought off a band of whites.

Four black schoolchildren raced home along a dirt road in Archer, Florida, in 1944, kicking up a dust cloud wake as they ran. They were under strict orders from their mother to run – not lollygag or walk or jog, but run – directly home after hitting the road’s curve.

The littlest, six-year-old Lizzie Robinson (now Jenkins), led the pack with a brother on each side and her sister behind carrying her books.

“And I would be [running], my feet barely touching the ground,” Jenkins, now 77, said at her home in Archer.

Despite strict adherence to their mother’s orders, the siblings weren’t told why they should race home. To the children, it was one of several mysterious dictates issued during childhood in the Jim Crow south.

As Jenkins tells it, the children didn’t know why Amos ’n’ Andy was often interrupted by revving engines and calls from her father to “Go upstairs now!”, or why aunt Mahulda Carrier, a schoolteacher, fled to the bedroom each time a car drove down their rural road.

Explanations for demands to hide came later, when Jenkins’s mother, Theresa Brown Robinson, whispered to her daughter the story of violence that befell the settlement of Rosewood in 1923.

Mahulda Carrier, a schoolteacher, fled to the bedroom each time a car drove down their rural road.

The town was 37 miles south-west of Archer on the main road to the Gulf. Carrier worked there as the schoolteacher, while living with her husband Aaron Carrier. On New Year’s Day 1923, a white woman told her husband “a nig_er” assaulted her, a false claim that precipitated a week of mob violence that wiped the prosperous black hamlet off the map, and led to the near lynching of Aaron Carrier.

Jenkins now believes that all of it – the running, calls to go upstairs, her aunt fleeing to the bedroom – was a reaction to a message her parents received loud and clear: don’t talk about Rosewood, ever, to anyone.

But after Jim Crow laws lifted, and lynch mob justice was no longer a mortal threat, survivors did begin to talk. So egregious were the stories of rape, murder, looting, arson and neglect by elected officials, that Florida investigated the claims in a 1993 report.
That led to a law that eventually compensated then elderly victims $150,000 each, and created a scholarship fund. The law, which provided $2.1m total for the survivors, improbably made Florida one of the only states to create a reparations program for the survivors of racialized violence, placing it among federal programs that provided payments to Holocaust survivors and interned Japanese Americans.

Rosewood burning

Where Rosewood once stood is now little more than a rural scrubland along state road 24, a lonely highway in central Florida bordered by swamp, slash pine and palmetto. A placard on the side of the road describes the horror visited upon the hamlet.

But in 1923, the settlement was a small and prosperous predominantly black town, with its own baseball team, a masonic temple and a few hundred residents. It was just three miles from the predominantly white town of Sumner, and 48 miles from Gainesville.


A black resident’s home is shown in flames during the race riots in 1923.

On New Year’s Day 1923, white Sumner resident Fannie Taylor was bruised and beaten when her husband returned home. The Taylors were white, and the residents of Sumner were in near universal agreement that Fannie’s assailant was black.

A crowd swelled in Sumner to find the “fugitive”, some from as far away as Gainesville, where the same day the Klu Klux Klan held a high-profile parade. Over the next seven days gangs of hundreds delivered lynch mob justice to the once-affluent town of Rosewood.

“I blame the deputy sheriff,” Robie Mortin, a Rosewood survivor, told the Seminole Tribune in 1999. “Because that lady never dropped a name as to who did what to her. Just said a negro, black man. But when the sheriff came along with his posse and everything, he put a name to the person: Jesse Hunter.”

Mortin died in 2010 at age 94 in Riviera Beach, Florida. She was believed to be one of the last survivors of the New Year’s riots in 1923. After years of silence she became one of the most vocal. Though Florida completed an investigation into the events that took place in Rosewood, some narratives remain disputed.

“They didn’t find Jesse Hunter, but noticed that here’s a bunch of ni_gers living better than us white folks. That disturbed these people,” Mortin said. Her uncle, Sam Carter, is believed to have taken the man who beat Taylor, a fellow Mason, to safety in Gulf Hammock, a few miles away. When Carter returned he was tortured, shot and lynched by the mob looking for Taylor’s assailant.

“My grandma didn’t know what my uncle Sammy had done to anybody to cause him to be lynched like that,” Mortin told the Tribune. “They took his fingers and his ears, and they just cut souvenirs away from him. That was the type of people they were.”

Carter is believed to be the first of eight documented deaths associated with the riots that would worsen over the next three days.

The Levy County sheriff, Bob Walker, holds a shotgun allegedly used by Sylvester Carrier, a black resident of Rosewood, to shoot and kill two deputized white men who were at his door in 1923

The settlement itself was wiped off the map. Several buildings were set on fire just a few days after New Year’s, and the mob wiped out the remainder of the town a few days later, torching 12 houses one by one. At the time, the Gainesvile Sun reported a crowd of up to 150 people watched the dozen homes and a church set ablaze. Even the dogs were burned.

“The burning of the houses was carried out deliberately and although the crowd was present all the time, no one could be found who would say he saw the houses fired,” a Sun report said, describing the scene.

At least two white men died, including CP “Poly” Wilkerson of Sumner and Henry Andrews of Otter Creek, when they attempted to storm a house Rosewood residents had barricaded themselves in.

A state report on the violence identifies murdered black Rosewood residents as Sam Carter, matriarch Sarah Carrier, James Carrier, Sylvester Carrier and Lexie Gordon. Mingo Williams, a black man who lived nearby, was also killed by the mob.

Aaron Carrier, Mahulda’s husband and Jenkins’s uncle, was nearly killed when he was dragged behind a truck and tortured on the first night of the riots. At death’s door, Carrier was spirited away by the Levy county sheriff, Bob Walker, she said, and placed in jail in Bronson as a favor to the lawman.

Mahulda was captured later the same night by the mob, Jenkins said, and tortured before Walker eventually found her.

“They got Gussie, that was my aunt’s name, they tied a rope around her neck, however they didn’t drag her, they put her in the car and took her to Sumner. Don’t know if you know – a southern tradition is to build a fire … and to stand around the fire and drink liquor and talk trash,” Jenkins said.

“So they had her there, like she was the [accused], and they were the jury, and they were trying to force her into admitting a lie. ‘Where was your husband last night?’ ‘He was at home in bed with me.’ They asked her that so many times so she got indignant with them … And they said, ‘She’s a bold bitch – let’s rape the bitch.’ And they did. Gang style.”

Another Rosewood resident, James Carrier, was shot over the fresh graves of his brother and mother after several men captured and interrogated him. He was first told to dig his own grave, but couldn’t because two strokes had paralyzed one arm. The men left his body splayed over the graves of his family members.

But despite widespread coverage of the incident – the governor was even notified via telegram – the state did nothing.

Not for one month, when it appears a feeble attempt to indict locals was made by a grand jury, after all the residents of Rosewood had long fled into the nearby swamps and settlements of central Florida.

The oral history of Rosewood was a secret, passed through several families with each recipient sworn to silence, as black Americans endured decades of terror in Florida. When Jenkins was six her parents would have had fresh memories of lynchings.

From 1877 to 1950, the county where the Robinsons lived, Alachua, had among the largest sheer volume of lynchings of any community in the nation, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Per capita, Florida lynched more people than any other state. And counties surrounding Alachua were not friendlier.

Hernando, Citrus, Lafayette and Taylor counties had some of the highest per capita rates of lynchings in the country. By volume, nearby Marion and Polk counties had among the most in the US.

That it wasn’t, Moore blamed on “psychological denial” and “blindness”.

“There were many things thought better left unquestioned,” Moore reasoned.

By 1993, before the report was issued, Moore’s story had made a wide impact, becoming a 60 Minutes documentary and earning follow-ups by other news outlets. Moore, however, recounted in detail his struggle for academic and political acceptance of the narrative, and said even 11 years after his story appeared many attempted to deny the massacre occurred.

One of Moore’s sources, Arnett Doctor, would later devote much of his life to lobbying for Rosewood reparations. Doctor, a descendant of survivors, spent untold hours eliciting detailed narratives of the event from survivors. He is often cited as the “driving force” behind the reparations bill, as the man who brought his findings to high-powered attorneys at Holland & Knight, who helped lobby the legislature for reparations.

Doctor died at the age of 72 in March 2015, in Spring Hill, Florida, a few hours south of Rosewood.

“We deliberately avoided anything but compensation for the losses they incurred,” said Martha Barnett, an attorney at Holland & Knight who helped lobby the Florida legislature on behalf of the survivors of Rosewood. Barnett said the term “reparations” can’t be found in the law passed in Florida.

Instead, attorneys focused on private property rights. She said she and other attorneys needed “to make it something legislators could find palatable in the deep south some 20-some years ago”.

Barnett said the then Democratic governor, Lawton Chiles, promised his support from the beginning. By April 1994, the House passed a bill to compensate victims of the attack with a 71-40 vote. Four days later, on 9 April 1994, the Senate passed a matching bill with a vote of 26-14, to cries of “Praise the lord!” from those Rosewood descendants present.

Too funny....

The Rosewood story will bode well with my Trayvon Martin II post...lol...
Don't think too many here will be interested in more whites killing blacks stories historical or not....

In the spring of 1890, the United States government sent a heavily armed vessel to dislodge a despot. Under his rule, citizens lived in fear of capricious acts of violence. He inflicted retribution on all who dared oppose him—and many who had not even tried. President Benjamin Harrison defended the military intervention to Congress, saying it was justified and in the interest of the nation.

This episode, however, did not take place on the shore of a distant nation, but instead off the waters of Florida in a small American town called Cedar Key, where mayor William W. “Billy” Cottrell had imposed a reign of terror so mendacious that it could only be halted by a man with deep connections to the White House.

By the time President Harrison took action, the trouble in Cedar Key had been brewing for more than a year. The first alert he received came from a local woman named Mrs. Rose Bell, who wrote to the President on August 4, 1889, and called for an investigation into the “outrageous conduct” perpetrated by the “habitual drunkard” Cottrell. Bell indignantly described Cottrell bullying locals, forcing a local black man to parade through the town in costume, and making his own sister a widow after a confrontation with his brother-in-law. The “good Christian men” of the town were too “timid” to put a stop to his outrages, and she concluded her letter by saying she had “no son or husband for him to fuss with and shoot. I expose his character.”

President Harrison would later note that it was “a very grim commentary upon the condition of social order at Cedar Keys, that only a woman…had the courage to file charges against Cottrell.”

It was a big scandal at the heart of this small archipelago off of Florida’s Gulf Coast, located more than 130 miles north of Tampa. Only one of the Cedar Keys, Way Key, is inhabited today (a dozen nearby islands comprise the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge). Despite their small size, the Keys’ location was considered strategic during the 19th century; they housed a critical supply depot established by General Zachary Taylor in 1836 during the Second Seminole War and would later be occupied by Union troops during the Civil War. The completion of a railroad linking the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico in 1860 boosted their value, making the Cedar Keys a hub for trade and transport before the completion of a railroad to larger Tampa. In the latter half of the 19th century, nearby Atsena Otie Key was home to a large mill supplying cedar for pencils and employing many residents. Over the years the economy would be driven by the seafood, manufacturing and milling industries. Cedar Key’s population peaked at less than 2,000 people, which makes it even more remarkable that the vile shenanigans of the town’s mayor reached the attention of the White House.





Residents were well-acquainted with the young mayor’s cruel—and at times homicidal—mood swings. Cottrell was first elected to the office in March of 1889, and was fond of using his firearms to intimidate his constituents. Readers across the nation would later learn of him forcing a black man—at gunpoint—to beat a telegraph operator senseless. Women shopping at a dry goods store were reportedly held hostage at gunpoint, seemingly for Cottrell’s amusement. As a child, rumor had it, he used a pocket knife to stab an elderly man who had dared to correct him, and the local Schlemmer House hotel was marked by bullet marks from the mayor’s drunken pursuit of a fellow patron.

“Aged men and prominent citizens have thus been treated…Ladies of the highest social standing were not exempt from these insults,” the New York World summated.

While his notoriety may have lent itself to exaggerated retellings, together the anecdotes paint a picture of Billy Cottrell as a young man out of control. “When [people] talk about him when he’s not intoxicated, he’s a normal person. He behaves, he gets along,” says James L. “Jim” Cottrell, great-grandnephew of Billy. “And then you throw some whiskey in him and he turns into Billy the Kid.” (Five years earlier, when racing his family’s schooner, Nannie, in Tampa Bay, another boat pulled ahead. An angry Billy ran below deck for his gun to shoot the competition before crewmates reined him in. The incident “speaks volumes to his character,” says Cottrell. “It doesn’t bode well.”)

The reputation and resources of Billy’s family had deferred any consequences for the mayor, who seems to have had no occupation of note before taking office. His father, J.L.F. Cottrell, was a state senator and one of his brothers, J.L. Cottrell, co-owned a store along one of the town’s main streets. Local records show he married Carolina Frier, who also came from a politically connected family, soon after taking office on January 2, 1890. When Cottrell was first elected at the age of 33, perhaps unaccustomed to the responsibility of a steady job, he reportedly disappeared from Cedar Key for more than a month. Upon his return, his style of governance would be enough to induce nostalgia for his neglect.


Mayor Cottrell kept his grip on the town through a combination of family connections, fear, and isolation, but the 1890 arrival of J.H. Pinkerton brought a new obstacle to the mayor’s reign of terror. Pinkerton had been named the new customs collector with oversight of revenue generation and maritime law, a fairly coveted and influential position. “Immediately when he got there, [he] ran up against Cottrell and had problems right from the beginning,” says Frank W. Pinkerton, J.H. Pinkerton’s great-grandson. Cottrell, serving concurrently as mayor and customs inspector (a position outranked by the job held by Pinkerton), may have expected to be automatically slotted into the more senior post. “Little did James Harvey Pinkerton know the quagmire in which he was about to be ensconsed,” Frank Pinkerton writes of the episode. Having been appointed through his connections in the Republican party, it was inevitable that Pinkerton’s arrival from out of town would raise the ire of the young hotheaded mayor.

However protected Cottrell might have been by his local stature, as an appointee of the Harrison administration, Pinkerton was not one to be intimidated. When Cottrell, in his usual fashion, threatened to kill him, Pinkerton sent a telegram to Washington as soon as he could do so safely. Their feud had escalated in previous weeks when Pinkerton insisted Cottrell resign from his position as inspector on account of his volatile reputation. Cottrell then appeared at the Customs house on the evening of May 9 accompanied by city marshal J.R. Mitchell, bruising for a fight.

According to Pinkerton’s descriptive May 22 dispatch to the Treasury Department, when Pinkerton refused to open the Customs House after hours, Cottrell ordered Mitchell to “shoot the G—d — m Republican son of a b—” if he failed to do so. “He then called me all the vile names he could think of in a loud and angry voice and said, ‘I will make it a hell for you and your set as long as you stay in Cedar Keys,’ and many other vile things equally bad, using all the time the most profane oaths and vile epithets,” Pinkerton wrote.

The reluctance—or refusal—of local authorities put an end to Cottrell’s behavior led Pinkerton to appeal for federal intervention, a request that was granted through the Revenue Cutter Service, which sent its ship McLane to the islands on May 15. Captain Thomas S. Smyth and his crew arrived days later, appalled by Cottrell’s long streak of impunity. Smyth wrote that “the newspaper reports…are not only not exaggerated, but do not tell one-half of this man Cottrell’s crimes. The fact is that the people here are in a perfect state of terror…[and] are unable to obtain assistance or protection from the State authorities, owing to the influence wielded by Cottrell, and the methods resorted to in frightening and terrorizing witnesses.”

Backed by the might of the McLane, Smyth’s crew and additional marshals launched a search for the mayor. The men scoured homes, businesses and the swampy waters, but Cottrell eluded capture, making his way up the Suwanee River and out of the McLane’s reach. Even after his escape, at Pinkerton’s request, the cutter remained nearby to assuage fears that Cottrell would reappear in town. While docked, the McLane continued firing blanks, the sound of its might echoing through the keys.



Despite more than a year of unmitigated abuses by Mayor Cottrell, the appearance of a federal cutter on their shores was not welcomed by all. More than 25 years after Union troops had left, a vein of intransigent hostility ran through the small town. “The people here have lived so long in an unreconstructed condition that the appearance of United States seamen in the streets intent on forcing order and obedience is especially galling,” the New York Times told readers on May 20.

Captain Smyth was threatened by a resident who threatened to shoot on sight any man who attempted to enter his home. He angrily reminded the crowd the McLane was there on the authority of the United States government. Complaints about the house searches made their way back to sympathetic congressmen in Washington, placing the McLane and other law enforcement officials acting on behalf of the government under increased scrutiny (as acting attorney general, future president William H. Taft was tasked with submitting the findings of an inquiry to President Harrison). Special deputy marshal S.L Estrange defended the action, saying he had been “religiously scrupulous” in ensuring that homes had not been entered unlawfully or without permission and that “the rabble will talk and bluster.”

President Harrison seems to have had the final say on the matter. In his June 6 response to the Senate, he declared that an appeal to local authorities was impossible in this case, given that the complaint would have been addressed to the very authorities allowing or perpetrating the violence.

“It will always be agreeable to me if the local authorities, acting upon their own sense of duty, maintain the public order in such a way that the officers of the United States shall have no occasion to appeal for the intervention of the General Government, but when this is not done I shall deem it my duty to use the adequate powers vested in the Executive to make it safe and feasible to hold and exercise the offices established by the Federal Constitution and the laws,” Harrison wrote.

On the ground in Florida, authorities had still not apprehended their man. Cottrell had made his way up the nearby Suwanee River toward the Georgia border, and then traveled onward into Alabama, where he was taken into custody by authorities but soon released on bond to await his day in court.

It did not take long for Cottrell to resume his ignoble habits, and on November 5, he was arrested after drinking heavily and picking a fight with a restaurateur. According to newspaper reports, Cottrell then swore vengeance upon Montgomery, Alabama, police chief Adolph Gerald, telling friends he planned to kill him and challenging the chief to a duel.

At just past 11 a.m. the next morning, Cottrell appeared in a horse-drawn buggy. Gerald didn’t wait to find out if Cottrell would actually make good on his threat. As Cottrell exited the carriage, Gerald shot him twice with a double-barreled shotgun, hitting him once in the torso and once in the eye, leaving him dying in the street, a “bloody and ghastly spectacle,” according to the Montgomery Advertiser.

In the end, it was not the intervention of President Harrison, nor the imposing Coast Guard cutter, but a shootout in Alabama that put an end to Cottrell’s escape from justice – and his life. Newspapers across the country carried news of his demise – the gunslinging mayor who himself died in a hail of bullets. “The bloody ending of a bloodthirsty monster,” eulogized the New York World.

Mean while, back in Cedar Key..........

The 1896 Cedar Keys hurricane was the final blow. Around 4 am on September 29, 1896, a 10-foot (3.0 m) storm surge swept over the town, killing more than 100 people. Winds north of town were estimated at 125 miles per hour (201 km/h), which would classify it as a category 3. The hurricane wiped out the juniper trees still standing and destroyed all the mills. A fire on December 2, 1896, further damaged the town. In following years, structures were rebuilt on Way Key, a more protected island inland, but the damage was done. Today, only a few reminders of the original town on Atsena Otie Key remain, including stone water cisterns, and a graveyard whose headstones conspicuously date prior to 1896. Also, many of the eastern red cedar trees that originally attracted the pencil company, and for which the community was named, are gone.