in the meme thread was a pic of a t-shirt with a manatee roasting on a spit over a fire..........

There was a time when this sort of thing happened, and it reminded me of a letter from the 1800s that had been preserved........... and Family.

Characters in the letter, primarily the Allens, are my cousins, aunts, uncles and G.G. Grandparents.....

'...Sis since we have been on the river the boys have killed two porpoises they were a show they must have weighed 400 or 500 lbs each they got 10 gals oil out of them it is worth $1 or !.50 per gal it is very good for lamp oil--- now sis I must begin to draw my letter a close. ..'

For those 'in the area' of Citrus County the site is Ozello


Transcription of Letter by Sarah Johns Willis, Salt River, Fl 1872


The following transcription is a letter1 from Sarah J Willis (Sarah J. Johns, daughter of Leroy Jefferson Johns and Lucinda Jones, who married G. T. Willis) to her sister N. E. Efurd (Nancy Johns, daughter of Leroy Jefferson Johns and Lucinda Jones, who married Giles Efurd.) written at Salt River, Florida on April 21st, 1872. Salt River is located at Ozello which is south of the town of Crystal River. This letter is one of the most valuable primary sources which shows linkages/relationships to various family members. The letter is four pages in length and written in very tiny cursive ink. All attempts are made to transcribe the letter as accurately as possible. In a few instances there are words which are illegible and a series of dots is used to denote the break in legibility. The use of punctuation in the original is not real clear. Generally, instead of adding punctuation extra spacing is added to help separate the sentences and ideas conveyed. In most cases the original spelling has been maintained with the occasional use of (sic) to denote different spellings/meanings.

page 1--- Salt River, Fla Apr 21st 1872 "Dear Sister, brother and nephews. I take the present opportunity of droping(sic) you a few lines in answer to your kind letter which I received a short time back and was very glad to hear from you all once more and to hear you tolerably well-- This leave us tolerably well. Mr. Willis had a severe attack of cholic short time back caused from kidneys from hard lifting. He is about over it now. It seemed as if he die -- it was the first spell he has had since Mat was a baby. He had been hauling up some cedar very hard work for one hand to do. I think was what brought it on him ---. The children are all going to school now to a Miss Blane from South Carolina we have a nice school room as near as sister Puss was to mother in Ala. Our neighbor Mr. Morton is a little farther than the schoolhouse-- It is nearly half way between us -- This is the Mr. Morton that lived at the Middle ground near Early Allens when you lived in this country -- we can pass on land back and forth --the only places on the Island arranged so conveniently -- the children are learning very fast = we have a three months school now but we expect to continue it 3 or 5 more my children have had no advantages of school much since we have been in this county we exspect (sic) to have a school every year now we until educate our children it is pretty tite (sic) to $20 per month and board a teacher that is what we are paying now the school has been in sission (sic - session) 7 weeks I have had the teacher up to this time we are very well pleased. Sis you wanted to know how we like the islands. I am well pleased the longer I stay the better I like. We are all well pleased none of us willing go back to the country --- we can live like fighting cocks when once get a (........) - We are eating hard head cabbage, Irish potatoes, onions,......., turnips, sweet potatoes and all such every day. page 2--- second page plnat (sic) potatoes raised last year we have a quite lot many..... of the finest kind more than we can use we averaged upwards 400 bushels to the acre. Last year we have 1 blsl (sic - bushel) of Irish potaotes planted now. I wish you had some of them. They are fine some of them large as my fist nearly---our cane and corn looking well we have some cotton growing it is looking well they cultivate their crop with hoes what work it get too rough for plowing until the roots rot out --- once and while we have a blow from the southwest that send us a big tide it has covered our little island that our houses are on several times nearly all over only once all over, but it last but a short time before it is off and gone --- it is small about one acre dry land and it is is cut off from the island we cultivate by a little marsh like it is between us and Mr. Morton. We have a good road across to the field. We have about 5 acres in cultivation, 3 in cane and three in corn now waist high in places some as high as a man head. sis I wish we had found these islands when we all first came here and settle we might all have a great deall(sic) better than we are. when you were at Wesly Rock you heard of Salt river and probably saw it. Giles has I know we are 4 miles down the river from there Dick Willis lives there on what they called buzzard roost island. they have not had good health there. they have been sick good deal it is thought to be on account of the salt and fresh water meeting there --- They were all well there yesterday Lenora has had 2 children since you left here about 13 months between them girl and boy. Uncle Mc and John's family all well last account I heard Uncle Johns wife has 3 children 2 younger than one she had directly after you left here which died, I think I wrote to you of Samantha and Warren Paul marrying She has no heirs as yet Jim's wife has had 2 more children since you left he is living on an island near Dr. Hodges Warren Paul also Uncle Mac is livng at a place called bear landing on the Withlacoochee River that old man Rogers settled and died there last fall Uncle John is living where Uncle Mac lived when you left here he owns both places now I believe I have not been to Uncles in 3 years I have not seen some of them in over 3 years. Uncle Mc Jimmy and Warren Paul were here last fall and picked them out page 3--- an island back west of us 2 miles and said they were coming to go to work soon. but they afterwards decided to go where they are now --- after they did not come to the Island they had picked out George and Proctor has laid claim on it and has cut down some and planted in cotton it is a very large island. they no (sic - know) not how large no one has been all over it 2 or 3 beautiful settlements near together on it right on the bank of the river. beautifiul shell banks for building on there is a great deal of scenery there to all these nice shell mounds as large as houses all rounded up like potato banks. All up and down the river The school children and teacher went out yesterday to the bird keys to get eggs but they too late to get many they were all hatched and spoilt. they also went to Shell Island out at the mouth Crystal River -- Sis you wanted to no (sic-know) of Bob and his tribe but you no (sic- know) nearly as much as I do I have not heard from them in some time and have not seen them since last summer. Milliann and the children were here. I have not seen Bob in 18 months They were well last we heard from them They live down on the hammock near Westy (sic Wesley) Allens they only had 2 children last I heard from them. Lucy Allen has 4 children She is making rather a slow start you will think. I reckon old Aunt Tilda and George Allen are keeping house down there near Bud --- I like to forgot to tell you Lucy Ann Allen an (sic- and) Henry King married last Thursday night - Old man Christia (sic- Christie) died about 4 weeks ago I hardly know what was the matter he was taken with severe cold and chill and died in three days as wicked as ever. Lody Christia has gone entirely!! blind and Fady Ann is confine to her bed all the time and has been for 3 years or more Aunt Betsey Allan was down here 4 or 5 weeks ago and stayed 2 weeks. She was well and looking well. Mary Allen, Early's wife, has had 2 children since you left here. sis although we live on an island we have more company here than any place we have been in the country it is only half mile by water to the mane (sic) land where people can come with their horse or buggy and at a dry time they can walk to the river rite (sic) in front our house and then only have cross the river it is up a creek. where they can ride That is the way we moved and floted (sic) our things across We have a large flat We are all perfectly healthy here as we could expect to be anywhere. page 4--- .......... gedding (sic - getting) very well fixed up here we have a ...... house, corn crib and potato house --- our dwelling is 40 ft long 2-16 ft square rooms with 8 ft passage between then a shed on the back side. The boys room 16 ft long 10 ft wide then at the other end joining my room we have a cook room an (sic - and) dining room the shed at that end the house is extended 2 ft further out leaving a shed 18 ft long then a petition ( sic- partition) run through dividing it in 2 rooms cookroom 8 by 10 dining room 10 by 10 then I have a good stove up in my cook room --- the cistern right out at the door of the cook room meat house a few steps farther (sic - further) --- a sentence written so small it not decipherable.................. Then salt water around me plenty --- we have oysters in abundance 8 months out of the the 12 and we have fish when ever we want them we were out some time ago and Mr. Willis caught the largest red fish I ever saw It must have weighed 50 or 60 lbs its head weighed 12 we had nothing to weigh it with right straw scales 25 lbs. Sis since we have been on the river the boys have killed two porpoises they were a show they must have weighed 400 or 500 lbs each they got 10 gals oil out of them it is worth $1 or !.50 per gal it is very good for lamp oil--- now sis I must begin to draw my letter a close. It has been so long since I have written that I make a poor out and I have got so I can't see without glasses. I don't expect you read it in a week it is so bad. --- you wanted to no (sic-know) about the children. They are nearly grown all of them George is only a few lbs behind his pa and Proctor weighs 125 or 30 lbs. Mattie is nearly as tall as I am and I don't think far behind in wieght. I am lean myself and have been ever since I came to this country --- The children will write to you before long --- You said something of some nice tetin..... (sic- tatting ??) you would send if you could for Mattie --- She is very anxious for it you might........ some in a letter so it is spread out in thin so as not to make too large a bulk and the letter not be too heavy. she would hardly no (sic-know) what to do with herself if she was to get it. she has the little cup you gave her yet --- sis you said you wanted the children pictures. I aim to send George and Proctor in this letter. They have 2 but Mattie only has one and her Pa one and I can't let them go until I get some more. I will send them as soon as they can get some . The the artist that took the ones we have is over at Dr. Hodges he may be at the head of the river before long. It is 8 miles to the head from here there is where we go to preaching when we have any We have had none this.........so far. We have Sunday school at our academy sabbath. Sis mother sent me yours and the childrens pictures last year. I have them in my album a very nice one a present from my old man. I was proud to get yours an (sic - and) now I want Giles to send me his in next letter to put yours in the album. I have plenty room in it. it hold about 50 pictures. I have been expecting Buds and his family pictures but never have got them yet. I have not had a letter since last summer from home in answer. I sent my picture to Bud to forward onto you and it was so long before I heard from it I thought it was lost. I guess by your getting it ..... it went through but I have not heard from Bud yet. I do not no (sic - know) what is the reason they don't write to me. sis when you write again tell me how far you live from Gamdy and if Liza Cadenhead went with them to Festas and Giles mother I want to hear the news generally tell Giles to write too We will be glad to hear from you any time Sis you wanted to no (sic - know) if I had quit snuff. I have been trying to quit for the last 2 months but have not yet. I have been trying smoking some but it is to much trouble. I have to quit everything else to smoke so I don't get time to smoke often. I had been troubled with hurting in my breast for some time. some thought it was caused by snuff and I concluded so too. I have been better off since I have used less of it. I had nearly a whole jar of snuff and sent it back to the Haiad (sic ?). I was not satisfied without it and am not yet out and broke from it. some I have looking poor and crong this spring some thought it was ..... dipping snuff. I have improved some lately --- sis Islands are carrying the day now a great many talk of settling islands. severall (sic) have already below us on the river 3 or 4 miles.... old man Christia had settled and (sic) island near Dick Willis. Well I must close by asking you and Giles to write often and will answer all your letters and the children will write to you as soon as they get a little better advanced. Mr. Willis send his best regards (sic ?) to you all the children have all grown so you would hardly know them if you was to see them. They want to see you all , often talk of either........ I would be so glad to see you all once more, but we have but little idea that we will ever meet on earth again, but hope to meet in a better world. Sis I have some strong ties in that bright world I hope to meet again to part no more.... Although I don't live ..... I should ......the Lord will forgive.......... good. We all join in love to you all. S J. Willis to N. E. Efurd This letter makes mention of the fact that Nancy and Giles Efurd had lived in this Florida area previous to the writing of this letter but had moved elsewhere, probably Pike County, Alabama. The "state" census2 of 1867 for Hernando County, Florida bears out the fact that Giles Efurd was a resident during that census.

1872 Salt River, Citrus County, FL

Interesting, used to visit my grandparents in Citrus Co, he remarried a Van Ness from down in there.

I used tube on the Crystal River. clearest water, like swimming pool water.

Good stuff Muffin !

That region is old school florida , Grandparents spent winters Inglis , Fl. and loved it there . They'd rent a little block cabin near a place called Big Bass Village .
I'd go over and spent -4-5-6-7 days with them usually after New Years , nice quiet little place back then .

I remember quite a few times water puddles would freeze - seemed like it was colder down there than Biloxi and now [not for long] fort walton area .

Back then if it had a use it got - got .

Wow....hands busy at the moment, will be back in a bit. Thanks for posting this.

In 1880, the little settlement of Ozello had a serious problem in locating a school. Until this time the only school was a tiny building on a point of land on the bay. A family had settled there and since there was no school, the mother collected eight or ten children and taught them herself. As other families moved into the area and settled on both sides of the St. Martin's River a new school was needed. People on the south side of the river didn't want the school located on the north side. People on the north side didn't want it on the south side. Finally a compromise was reached. The school was built on an Indian mound on a small island in the middle of the river. This was agreeable because it was said that a child who could not row a boat by the time he was six years old was beyond the hope of education. The peak enrollment at this school was fifty-two pupils.

Mr. Robert Wells of Crystal River, who attended the island school many years ago, described it as a 24' x 30' building with a wood burning heater and three hanging coal oil lamps. There were never any electric lights in the building. He had very pleasant memories of the school, except for one man the teacher who made derogatory remarks about the community and the way of life there. He was “run off” by the pupils and replaced by a woman teacher. Robert Wells remembers the school as being like a big happy family. He related that after the school closed it was used as a polling place for a time. When a storm washed the building off its blocks it was finally demolished. The island in the middle of the river is still known as “School House Island.”

Crystal river is good but the crystal clear tubin' river is the Rainbow.....

Croft's, Van Ness's, Spooner's....place is full of um......

Fella long passed was born on the first island one crosses westbound on the Ozello Trail around 1940. Name was JC Wells. Met him down in the Keys and he was quite a remarkable man. Will tell the story after I get a pic scanned.

Fascinating.

Some thing never change. Like two communities bickering over where a school should be built, lest the location favor one or the other party.

Some things do change. Kids entrusted to row themselves and whoever was in their charge, across a body of water by rowboat twice daily to attend school on an island. No power, no phone (assuming). And evidently, they had the skills and experience to do it safely, and the parents were fine with it. Just terrific. Amazing.

Today that rowboat would be weighed down with more blinking lights than an airliner on approach and more reflective tape than a construction site, the capacity cut by two-thirds because they needed room for a licensed rowboat pilot, a rescue swimmer, and an administrator-type to assign blame away from the school should it capsize.

Those pictures are fantastic ! The turtles bring back great memories. Growing up in Key West I vaguely remember the turtle corrals when there were still turtles in them and you could get a turtle steak. Later there was always a grapple hook ready on Hectors boat. If a Green turtle came up around the boat we’d look around and if there weren’t any boats near we’d try and catch the turtle. I was there for six or eight. Pretty hard to drag a big turtle into the boat with a 12-13 year old me and and a little sixty something year old man. We managed and butched them and hid the meat under the fish. I’ve fished all my life in Florida and commercial fished off and on and have never seen sawfish that big.

This is a great thread. I am a long way from Florida and the only time I’ve ever been there was to Orlando for a trade show, but this is very interesting history to me.
What are sawfish, a type of shark or ray? Of course the Greenies would schit at the turtle pic.

I've ate sea cow and turtle both ways and also have a couple of sawfish bills. I sure feel blessed to have been born in Florida 62 years ago also glad I left 20 years ago. Excellent book on some of the history of old Florida.
https://www.amazon.com/Land-Remembered-Patrick-D-Smith/dp/1561641162

Eagerly awaiting DD’s post !

Love the expression on the face of the guy with the white shirt and bow-tie

My Dad’s family moved to Florida from VA in 1923. High Springs. Prior to that, they were from Middle Georgia since the early 1700s.
Florida was very rural when I was a tad. We supplemented the family table with a varied catch. Fish of all kinds, turkey, quail, doves and cranes, manatee, alligator, turtle, bear, raccoon and squirrels.

The kids of the era mentioned in the OP's post were subject to a much different life than kids today.
It was pre-child labor laws in the south and many of the kids growing up in those days that were within the vicinity of a Seafood Packing Company would have been working...

The following I am snipping from archives of some Child Labor investigations of these canneries along the gulf coast from Florida to around Mississippi published in March of 1911.


Manuel, the young shrimp-picker, five years old, and a mountain of child-labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year. Understands not a word of English.


They all shuck oysters, the boy on left end is George Wikowski, nine years old; next is John Collins; next is Steve Strupeck, who worked last year; on right hand end is Frank Obin, eight years old whom I found asleep on the floor of the shucking shed at 4 o'clock in the morning.


Scene in canning factory showing a 7-year old girl who shucks 3 pots of oysters a day, and works regularly, and her 6-year old brother who helps some. Also a 11-year old boy who does six pots a day. Several others here under 12 years, but there were more last month. Mostly negro workers. The boss said "We keep only enough whites so we can control the negroes and keep them agoing.


10 year old Jimmie. Been shucking 3 years. 6 pots a day, and a 11 year old boy who shucks 7 pots. Also several members of an interesting family named Sherrica. Seven of them are in this factory. The father, mother, four girls shuck and pack. Older brother steams. 10 year old boy goes to school. Been in the oyster business 5 years. Father worked for 25 years in the Pennsylvania Coal Mine, and the oldest brother there[?] They said they liked the oysters business better because the family makes more.



Rosy, an eight-year-old oyster shucker who works steady all day from about 3:00 A.M. to about 5 P.M. in cannery. The baby will shuck as soon as she can handle the knife.



And they even gave them houses



Then along came the bloody liberals of the day.....

Saw Fish are Rays.



Not to be confused with the Saw Shark



At one time there were many of the larger Saw Fish along the Florida coast, some can still be found.
They were hurt pretty bad by the net fishermen due to being easily entangled in their nets.

There is still a decent population of Saw Fish in Florida and on occasion a larger one being caught will make some local headlines. The larger population I am familiar with is along the Mangrove Islands in the Everglades but they seem to be mostly younger, smaller fish.


From the looks of these vintage images I have collected over the years it must have been a sport to collect the Saw Fish bills.

I have a recipe book that was published by the Department of Agriculture if I recall correctly, it is a federal publication that was printed in the early 1900's. It has Porpoise recipes and lists the nutritional value of the meat. I'll dig it up here and get the title of it.....

Thanks again for all the pics JeffA. This is something I was completely unaware of but now I’m fascinated. I guess I should have figured there was “frontier” history in Florida, it’s just a place that has never really been on my radar.

Pretty neat to have that letter from relatives Muffin. We have a good bit of family historical stuff from OK and it’s a neat look back into the ways of the past.

Mike, my Great uncle Dewey Allen was the mayor of Yankeetown................

My family on my mothers side started in South coastal Georgia in the early 1780’s and then moved south to the south Florida area after the first Seminole Indian war. They fished and cattle ranched along the edge of the Everglades early on and then when Flagler drove his railroad down to them they added tomato farming around Homestead. I really cannot imagine how tough it had to be to live along the edge of the Everglades long before it was drained , mosquito control , and A/C ! I met my Great Uncle Dub when he was in his eighties in about 1976. He’d been a cowboy on the north side of the Everglades around Arcadia Florida all his life. His legs had big pock marks where he’d been bitten by rattlesnakes repeatedly over the years. I was just old enough to have discovered that old people would tell stories and I didn’t believe him about being bitten until he pulled his pants leg up and showed me the scars. I remember him telling me the first time he was bitten he nearly died. After the first time he said he’d take some aspirin and go get in a dark room because he was going to wish he’d die !

Great thread! I remember my great granny telling me how turtle eggs were the absolute best for making a cake and how she wished I could have had one made with turtle eggs. My great grandfather would take the Sunday school children down to the beach and collect eggs and a turtle every now and then. Back then they would keep the tarpon they caught and considered the snook 'soap fish"

And today the Snook are at the top of the table fare list and no one would consider eating a Tarpon.

Before this thread drifts off into the abyss of the CF archives I'm going to add a few more random photos that I have in my collection from some research I did some time back on the area...

Now if some one can tell me they tipped a few at either of these local Ozello bars I'll be surprised..

I believe that "Bar" above would now be named "Peck's" and it's a Seafood restaurant . Back when I was a young boy living in the "Park" at the end of the road, it was a local dive bar/tackle shop where I could buy sinkers, hooks and the occasional piece of candy.

One day, my father took me in tow there to purchase some new shear pins for the outboard, as we had broken our last one. There was but one customer, far down the bar, setting upon his vinyl and chrome barstool, nursing his beer. I happened to look under the barstool nearest me, and there was a crumpled bill under it. I leaned over, grabbed it and stuffed it in my shorts pocket. Once back at camp, I discovered my prize was in fact a Ten dollar bill! Back in the 60's, that was big money for a young boy, and I had a good supply of hooks, sinkers, and candy for quite a few months!

Yes, the Pirates Cove was a rundown mess for quite awhile. Against my Mother's admonishment, we boys would sneak over there and scrounge around the ruins, just checking things out. We never took anything from there, not that there was much left anyway.

Caught my very first Sea Trout off the little point at the end of the road there in that park. In fact, I spread my Father's ashes there after his passing at that very spot too.

I recall we used to dip Shrimp at night under the culvert that goes under the road. Dad would hang a gas lantern over the one end and there's a little ledge about a foot or so wide under there. He and others, would see the Shrimp being pushed through by the Tide and dip them with a net and put them in a garbage can with ice in it.

Years later as we could afford it, we purchased a Sears Jon boat, a model particular to the South. Fourteen feet long, with maybe 36" width and only about 8" freeboard......not very deep at all. Once had a very live and very pissed off Shark join me in that boat, and the mayhem that ensued still remains a vibrant memory...but that is a story for another time.

All us kids ever had to fish with were Cane poles, never had the money for fancy Rod&Reels until many years later. We started Shrimping at night with the boat. Dad would stand in the front with a car headlight taped to a helmet and connected to a car battery we had setting on the floor of the boat. Once we were in the pass leading to the Grass flats, we would make pass after pass and Dad would point which way he wanted me to turn the boat so we could make another swing through. We would come in about 2:00 or 3:00 am and ice down the Shrimp, get some sleep and then Mom would make breakfast while we cleaned Shrimp. We would take a couple Shrimp and go fishing out in the boat on the flats. We used a skinny cane pole as a bait rod. We would use small pieces of Shrimp on an even smaller hook to catch Pinfish, and then use them on larger Cane poles with a big cork attached at the proper depth to catch Trout and such.

Once, while on the flats, we had a Greater Hammerhead come ghosting across under our boat. It's head was at the bow of the boat and the tail was still past the stern.....biggest Shark I've EVER seen!

Once we were finished fishing, we'd stop at an Oyster Bar on the way in and chip off a few dozen Oysters with an old Brick Masons hammer, and bring them back in an old, wet, burlap bag so that we could eat them with dinner. The only way my mom would eat them was roasted on a wire rack we'd found, over a fire, until they popped open.

I still have that old hammer in fact......

We never knew we were poor, we just lived differently than other folks.....but as a young boy, it was an adventure!

I recall a family that lived on a houseboat of sorts. We would see them only occasionally. They had several young children as I recall, and the boat had all kinds of things lashed down on the outside that they might need, such as washtubs, net's, and assorted other things.....I've wondered what ever happened to them every so often over the years.

If you care to make the drive to Peck's Old Port Cove (as it's called today), they have a pretty decent menu and the atmosphere is fantastic. You can drive over the "Culvert" where we Shrimped all those many years ago, and at the end of the road, you will still find that "Park" and can still see the remnants of where the old Hotel once stood. Looking at the launch, on the left you'll see the "Point" where my Father's remains were spread...be sure to say a hello to "Sparky" (his nickname) if you go...…


Thank you for letting me share my story.....


Frog----OUT!

Nope.

Pecks is and always was Pecks, Happy Helens was another place and Happy Helen lived here on the island too.

Pirates Cove bar and restaurant was many things to many folks but it was the live music and nightlife that made it memorable for most.
It had to be a quite interesting location to have grown up living out there on the point as a young boy, not much has changed other than they swept up and hauled away all that remained of the buildings now, just a couple picnic tables sitting under the trees is all that is still there.

The fishing, shrimping and gathering of Oysters are still common practice in the area, seldom is there not someone fishing those culverts, Red fish and Trout abound.....

It's said that Ozello is one of the last remaining pieces of "Old Florida" still left intact.



I know the exact spot you mention very well, I go there a few times a week, I'll make it a point to hello to your father.....

Good read, thanks for sharing

Fascinating thread.

Thanks to all that have posted.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this entire thread. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

I see in the plea for the children, whomever objected from the kids working in the canneries didn't object from the children going back and working in the strawberry field.

Damn good thread!

Very interesting stuff!

If you take a look at the satellite image on Google Maps of the Crystal River area, just SW of the airport you will see Ozello Trail. Proceed westbound on that biker's dream until you come to the first cluster of civilization on the west side of a meandering channel and you'll see where my friend J.C. was born. On a house boat.

I don't recall the specifics about family size but the houseboat was around 30' in length. He grew up a bit and started going to school, via a bus. Apparently the island school was a thing of the past. He did have to cross the channel by boat to get to the bus stop on the east side so they had a little rowing skiff for that purpose. If it had been raining they often had to get out of the bus, just the boys mind you, and push the bus thru some of the mud holes along the way. Such was life out on the Trail. In 1950 the region was visited by Hurricane Easy which visited most of its damage a little further up the coast, but it was a Cat 3 storm and as a result left some damage in the area. They wound up with something around 15 family members living on the houseboat for a spell, and the ol' man decided they had seen enough. They moved down to Marathon in the Florida Keys, leaving the extended family to rebuild and carry on.

And carry on they did. As fate would have it JC came home and I went to visit. He showed me where all of the above transpired and at least one family business with the Wells name above the front door. So, with the history out of the way, I'll relate a few things about his adventures in the Keys.

He continued school of course and always wore shorts. Flip flops, tee shirt? No, barefoot and bare chested. He learned to dive on his own and found a vast pool of amusement in cruising under the 7 Mile Bridge, collecting fishing lines from the Yankees on the bridge on opposite sides and tying or tangling the lines before giving them a good yank. Another pastime was chasing sharks in the flats with a buddy, armed with a gaff and a club. They actually won those battles a few times without shedding their own blood.

Moving forward a bit, I met JC in the mid to late '80s. A couple of ambitious friends of mine had purchased Faro Blanco Resort just east of the 7 Mile Smile (aka Bridge) and JC kept his charter boat there. First impressions? He was enormous, and had a terrific since of humor. First trip with him, we were going out to snare some cobia and I asked how long we'd be out. He replied "Til you get tired." I thought "Hey, I'm no stranger to fishing and I don't get tired.", but stifled the comment and just said, "OK". We got to one of his many fishing holes, he tossed the anchor and handed me a heavy spinning rig with 50# mono. I thought "WTF?" He told me the drag was set tight and not to worry about it. Put a pinfish on the hook and tossed it over the side. Might have taken at least 2 minutes before I was hooked up and, well, I was expecting, you know, maybe 20# fish. First hookup was a 40 pounder and boys, it was Hemorrhoid City!

But I won in the end and in the process found and answer to another puzzle. He had no gaff on the boat, but instead had a huge dip net. 5' deep pocket, 4' diameter hoop...he leaned over the side and scooped that thing up and plopped it in the cooler in a blink. And the show went on.....about an hour and a half later I moaned to JC, "I'm tired." He laffed, and my buddy said "Me too.", so we went home. 19 fish in the cooler and not a single one was less than 35 pounds. One was a few pounds over 50. Wow...

And so it went when fishing with him. Didn't matter what you were chasing, you caught them. He was so good at the game that other captains would try to follow him now and then to find out where his fishing holes were. When he saw one approaching we'd up anchor and move along, have a nice polite chat with them when they came near and resume fishing when they left. A few times they even employed planes to try and pin down his secrets. Planes couldn't sneak up on him either.

I mentioned earlier his size and sense of humor if you recall. Picture below has him on the left, me in the middle and another wacko buddy on the right. I'm 6'2" and about 225# in that picture. JC is pushing 50 years of age pretty hard. The mutton snapper head he holds was very near world record size but got trimmed by a shark beside the boat. If you think a 20 something pound mutton can't bend your knees on 50# spin tackle, think again. What you see before us is a very small portion of what we hauled in that day.


One more story and I'm wrap this up. JC had some clients out one day tarpon fishing by the 7 Mile Smile and when it came time to leave his anchor had snagged something. He used the boat to drag it into the shallows, hopped over and found an old barge anchor used by the crews employed by Henry Flagler to join all the Keys by rail back in the late '20s and '30s. Nobody told JC he couldn't, so he picked it up and put it in his boat. They returned to Faro Blanco and he put in on the dock. An ancient historical relic, about 6' in length with hooks spread about 5' and a 5' cross bar. The crossbar was about 3" in diameter, the main shank of the anchor about 5-6". Nobody, me included, could budge that thing after he put it there. My guess on weight is ballpark 500#. Someone told me he didn't even fart when he put it there.

Around year 2000 he was diagnosed with cancer and passed a few years later. He had come home to Ozello and gave me and my wife a tour, replete with many humorous tales. We visited him quite a few times and as a result settled near there after I retired. He went home and his remains are out there where he was born. He was, like many of the old timers in the region, a remarkable man and a joy to be around. It was a privilege to know him.

A different breed of people than now.
Somewhere is my families history, not as extensive, and illinois, iowa, missouri, nebraska folk. Stories of smallpox, fever; and railroad speculators lieing to buy land. A letter telling a mother of her son being cared for in another town by strangers. The letter so they would know what happened because they did not expect him to live.

Spent a lot of time up in Citrus County as a lad and on into my late 20's, especially around Crystal River. As someone already mentioned, it is Old Florida. Sadly, hasn't been on my radar since my Dad was in the hospital several years ago while he was still living outside Crystal River.

Great thread, muffin. And great pics, JeffA.

G.G.G.Granddad - buried Crystal River

G.G.Granddad - buried Crystal River

G.Granddad - buried Lecanto - 7 mi east of Crystal river

Grandmother/Father - Lecanto


Dad's still alive and well..... if they cover me up with Citrus County sand I'll be generation No. 6.....................

Wow, your family really has some history here...

Thanks guys. A great read. I knew yours would be good DD. Thanks for that too. Be Well, Rustyzipper.

Amazing thread, If I could live my life over. I spent a few years in the 60s there but my wife could't take the heat.

Mike

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.