Don Cesar: against the odds

St. Petersburg Beach had a lot of empty space 
when the Don Cesar opened in the 1920s.
Photo credit: Florida Memory

The Great Depression swept across the nation in 1929. In Florida, it started earlier -  in 1926 with the collapse of the Florida Land Boom. So I was surprised to learn that the famous Don Cesar resort in St. Petersburg Beach first opened its doors in 1928.

Developer Thomas J. Rowe was already building the massive hotel when the Florida boom crashed. He'd also sold lots in a subdivision he was creating around the hotel and had started building the Spanish-style houses so popular then. But he wouldn't admit defeat.

In June Hurley Young's The Don Ce-Sar Story, she describes Rowe as a man of poor health but an astute businessman with a high tolerance for risk. He had to be, to continue pursuing such a dream in a time of shaky finances. A combination of savvy business dealings, partnerships, loans and mortgages saw him through.

The 300-room hotel was completed in December 1927. It featured towers and wings and other Mediterranean and Moorish design elements.

The official opening took place January 16, 1928 with a gala attended by 1,500 people. Hurley provides details about the event, the kind that add color to dates and other numbers. Picture a Gatsby-style evening:

• Women in gowns and men in tuxedos arrived in LaSalles, Chryslers, Marmons and other upscale cars. 
• The entrance was canopied in red fabric.
• Dancing in the large ballroom cost $2.50 per person. I guess people were able to skip the dinner and attend just the dancing portion of the evening.
• No word on the type of food or cost of the dinner, which was served in the fifth-floor dining room and eaten on Black Knight china from Germany. 
• Flowers filled the rooms.
• The Don Ce-Sar Orchestra provided music.
• Nella Erickson and Helen Ford sang a Brahms duet.
• Guests toured the rooftop gardens. 

Guest rooms contained mahogany furniture and the best horse-hair mattresses of the era. Some rooms even featured private baths - which wasn't a given at the time, the way it is today.

St. Petersburg Beach back then was still a semi-wilderness, as the photo with this post shows. The Don Ce-Sar (later renamed the Don Cesar without the hyphen) started as a seasonal resort that opened for only January and February each year. People flocked to the resort for those two months in 1928, 1929 and even 1930.

In fact, in 1930, hotel guests included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. Hurley writes that they stayed for the season. Nightly rates that year ranged from $12 for a single room to $30 for a suite (roughly $214 to $535 today). The price included meals.

The grand resort had its ups and downs through the years and was almost demolished in the 1970s. Hurley was a leader in the successful effort to save the historic landmark. It was restored by hotel magnate William Bowman Jr.

Since the early days, the massive structure has had several owners and multiple uses including as a government office building. Today, it remains a gem worth visiting. 

Read the Don Cesar's full history on the hotel website and in Hurley's book, which has gone through seven printings since being published in 1974. It's available via several outlets online. I found my copy at a local independent bookstore. The hotel also has a tribute to Hurley on its blog. She died in February 2024.

Past meets future

Am posting a bit earlier than usual this month for time reasons. This post has updates about two places I've written in the past:

• One has a time element: The Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum in New Smyrna Beach is having a heritage festival this Saturday - February 24, 2024. I hope you can make it.

• The other is about the former St. Benedict the Moor Catholic School in the Lincolnville neighborhood in St. Augustine. Many thanks to historian and author David Nolan for alerting me to the good news about a community project in development in that building. I hope you can support it. 

Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum
(Photo credit: Peter Bauer)

MARY S. HARRELL BLACK HERITAGE MUSEUM

The Black Heritage Museum is housed in the historic former Catholic church, St. Rita's, that served the Black community in the midcentury years of the 20th century. Those earlier days are the focus of my 2016 post. 

Both past and present are featured in the excellent exhibits on view at the museum today. You can learn a great deal about the life and times of the community from its early days through today. Guided tours are part of the 31st annual Black Heritage Festival, which takes place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. February 24 in Pettis Park, adjacent to the museum building. Many other activities are also part of the festival.

Guided tours offer insights and context to exhibits that a visitor otherwise wouldn't know. I remember, during my visit, being shocked to learn that the community had protested the impending closing of their Black school during integration days. Shocked, because I had been taught otherwise, had been taught that Blacks applauded the school moves.

I was young during school integration days, and attending an already integrated Catholic elementary school in New York City. My (erroneous) knowledge was gained later, via the prevailing narratives taught in public high schools in my time. The older I get, the more I understand how much history contains nuanced and sub-surface levels, and shifting perspectives that depend on time and place of the telling. 

Of course I digressed.... Try to attend the festival and tour and support the museum. You'll be glad you did.

A blessing ceremony for a restoration and
transformation into a neighborhood center took
place at the former St. Benedict the Moor School 
building. (Credit: First Coast News/Jessica Clark)

ST. BENEDICT THE MOOR SCHOOL

I was again shocked - this time in a good way - to learn that the 1800s building that housed St. Benedict the Moor School in St. Augustine is being restored! When I wrote about the former school in a 2017 post, I wasn't even sure the actual building even stood any longer. I couldn't find any then-current photos of it.

So imagine my delight to learn that the Sisters of St. Joseph - who taught Black children at the school many decades ago - have launched a restoration project. Their goal is to restore the building and use it as a neighborhood center. Among other services, the St. Joseph Neighborhood Center will provide single mothers with education and job skills training. 

First Coast News featured a January 2023 article about a blessing ceremony at the project site as restoration got under way. What the Sisters of St. Joseph need right now is your support to keep the ministry project moving forward. Learn more and donate via the St. Joseph Neighborhood Center's website. (And, fellow Catholics among readers, consider it a good way to boost your Lenten almsgiving.)

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I didn't plan this, but both my updates involve historic former schools in which Catholic sisters defied social norms by serving Black communities in a Jim Crow South. I know there are challenges that need fixing within Catholicism. But there is also so much good within the faith. Catholic sisters are past and present proof of that.

Punta Rassa: small size, big history

Punta Rassa may be small, but it's history is large.
This image shows a structure there from the late
1800s. (Credit: WGCU Public Media)

Punta Rassa is a small, flat piece of Florida with a big history. The waterfront land near Fort Myers in Southwest Florida has seen everything from cattle drives to cowboys, military troops and blockade runs to and from Cuba.

For a while, Punta Rassa was diverse before diversity. During the Civil War, troops stationed there came from all across the United States. They sometimes had trouble communicating because of their regional accents. The white New York City soldiers couldn't understand the Black soldiers from Virginia who couldn't understand the Black soldiers from Louisiana. As one historian says in the video linked in this post, at least they all knew they were on the same side.

According to Wikipedia, the name Punta Rassa evolved from the Spanish phrase Punta Rasca, which means smooth or flat point. It's an apt description for this sliver of Florida lowland. 

Only about 1,500 people live in Punta Rassa today, on land that's less than five square miles in size. The area's big back story makes up for it. Enjoy this history video from Florida Gulf Coast University's WGCU Public Media: Punta Rassa, Untold Stories.

Unusual 1895 travel memoir

Partial cover of Rev. Anderson's book.
Photo credit: DocSouth

I tend to consider legitimate self-publishing a fairly recent phenomenon. Something that started when Amazon went up against the publishing gatekeepers. Before that, there were only vanity presses that most writers shied away from. 

Ditto for my thoughts about authors marketing their own work. Both traditionally published and indie published writers must do that today. But they also did so in the past.

Writers have been underwriting their own works for a long time. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens come to mind among the biggies. Authors have long promoted their own works, too. I recently found an unknown-to-me, intriguing example: a book published in 1895 by a Georgia minister named Robert Anderson. He undertook months-long trips to market and sell his self-published memoir about his travels throughout the Eastern United States.

He wrote Rev. Robert Anderson's Surpriser when he was 75 years old. It's an autobiographical account of the people and places he encountered on trips through Florida, other Southern states, and Northern states in 1893 and 1894. Everywhere he stopped, he actively promoted and sold his books and also preached when invited. He found selling more difficult in Northern cities than in Southern ones.

For purposes of this blog, I'll share some of Anderson's experiences in Florida. But it's Anderson himself I want to learn more about. 

The book's unsigned Preface says Anderson was born in 1819 and is "is among the oldest colored men now living in Georgia." The Preface also states that the book was currently in its 5th edition and providing the author his only means of income. His advanced age hampered his ability to conduct his life's work, the ministry.

Other biographical gems in the Preface point out that Anderson became a citizen in 1838, was employed by banks in Macon, Ga., in his younger days and was known throughout Georgia and other parts of the South. 

Anderson himself tells readers, in his book's subtitle, that he "united with the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1839." He seems to have had a lengthy career in ministry as well as the jobs in four banks in Macon. 

Anderson also writes of having a guardian after he purchased himself and his wife for $1,500 during the days of slavery. He shares this matter-of-factly as part of an anecdote about an encounter during his travels. Otherwise, the reader learns little of his early life or how he felt about social conditions. 

That $1,500 was an incredible sum of money in the 19th century. Did Anderson earn it at the banks? In ministry? Later in the book, he comments that he also bought his mother and grandmother out of bondage. Many questions are unspoken and unanswered. How did he become a good writer in an era when education was denied to most Blacks in the South? Why was he so prominent as an elder? How did he come to have such a widespread reputation? 

Early in the book, Anderson thanks the many people who bought previous editions of his book and lists each buyer by name and state. Buyers were generous - many paid the modern equivalent of $30 to $50 per copy. 

Buyers were also often white. Anderson rightly said that was because Blacks didn't have as much disposable income. He also stressed that Southern Blacks needed education and a financial step up. But he also expected people, both white and Black, to act respectably and responsibly and to get along peaceably. He is firm in his opinions and his moral stance.

Anderson says he encountered "bitters and sweets" during his 1893 and 1894 travels, but the book overall has a positive tone. Still, there were some tensions. In Boston, Anderson was accused of being on a public relations journey to boost Georgia's image and contradict what Ida B. Wells was writing about lynchings in the South. He denied the charge in the same measured tones he uses throughout the book. 

Other receptions were more cordial, particularly in the South. Anderson comes across as a truly Godly man. He stayed with church ministers and congregation members whenever possible and did numerous guest preachings. He traversed color lines and said many people gave him money even when they didn't buy a book.

In Florida, one lady who purchased a book also sold Anderson oranges at a penny apiece. The woman then gave him money for freight charges needed to ship the oranges to his family in Georgia. One minister and his wife refused to accept payment for boarding Anderson for 11 days in Jacksonville. 

St. Augustine's sights impressed Anderson, particularly Fort Marion (as Castillo de San Marcos was known at that time), Flagler's Hotel Ponce de Leon, and the city's paved streets. "If you want to see heaven on Earth, come to St. Augustine," he writes. "I never saw such splendor in my life."

The splendor, right now, to me, is that we have Rev. Anderson's travel memoir. I felt I started to get to know him, and I wanted to learn more. I wish there was a biography or that he left a full autobiography.

Read the entire Surpriser text online at Documenting the American South, also known as Doc South. The website's about page explains DocSouth as a digital publishing initiative by the library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The site's collection is amazing. Prepare to spend a lot of time there.

Finding the light

Circle of Light takes place in 1898 Florida

Bloom where you're planted. Easy to say. Hard to do.

That's the tagline for my latest novella, Circle of Light: A Persimmon Hollow Christmas Novella. The phrase describes the inner and outer journey of the heroine, Clara, who is newly arrived in the fictional frontier town of Persimmon Hollow in 1898. She's far from happy about her family's move to the small town in the Florida wilderness. 

Circle of Light is set during Advent and Christmastide and the season plays a big role in the story. Advent is a season of light and hope. Clara tries to embrace those feelings as December unfolds. Her family and newfound acquaintances try to help her help herself. That includes a young man who offers to show Clara the sunny side of life in a near-wilderness.

But Clara, at first, stubbornly clings to memories of what she considers the more civilized world she left behind in her northern city home.

There are personal reasons for Clara's resistance to change. You'll have to read the novella to find out what they are. But period newspapers shed light on some external reasons why she might have bemoaned leaving what she called civilization. 

Persimmon Hollow in 1898 was a still-growing settlement populated by earthy pioneer people. Larger Northern cities had more resources and residents. That urbanity is reflected in news media such as a December 1, 1898, issue of The Catholic Telegraph newspaper. 

The Catholic Telegraph was based in Cincinnati, Ohio, which had a population of more than 300,000 people in 1898. The city was cosmopolitan compared to Persimmon Hollow's 1,400 residents and sandy streets paved with pine straw.

The newspaper's women's page decreed the following as fashionable for winter 1898-1899:

• New shell combs that were curved to fit the head and worn directly "under the knot arranged high." These combs also supported heavy winter hats.
• Expensive buttons and belt buckles that were "a distinct feature of autumn and winter gowning." They were so trendy that "almost every stylish toilet or costume has one or the other or both."
• Without doubt, "white gloves are to be worn with everything this year." The type of fabric depended on the use: chamois for daily street wear, high-sheen cotton with decorative black topstitching for upscale street wear, and plain high-sheen cotton or kid for evening.
• A new trend from France, where French women were "wearing pointed wraps of cloth to match their gowns."

Catholic women in Persimmon Hollow in 1898 may have received the Catholic Telegraph through the mail and read about these trends. However, most items described as fashionable weren't seen on an average day in Persimmon Hollow. 

Some of the newspaper's household hints were more applicable to a frontier town. Some, though, weren't. The small settlement probably didn't have whole nutmeg available in small local stores. The tip to always start grating at the flower end wouldn't have been helpful.

More fitting for the frontier setting was a suggestion for cleaning flatirons in warm water, using a half tablespoon of melted lard to every two quarts of water. Readers also were advised to soak lamp wicks in vinegar and thoroughly dry them before use. "They will draw well and will not smoke."  

Finally, this odd (to modern ears) tip might have caused heroine Clara to raise her hands in despair for remembering amenities she'd left behind. Streetcars were unknown in Persimmon Hollow. But city dwellers reading the newspaper were told to do the following when riding a streetcar: "Practice deep, full breathing, which robs even bad air of half its dangers."

Persimmon Hollow had the edge over all cities in air quality, for it was pure and healthful. The town had other charms, too, which Clara gradually comes to realize with help from her faith, family, friends, and a love interest. My historical romances have HEAs (Happily Ever After) endings, and Circle of Light is no exception.

Backwoods life, no filter

Florida residents sit with their guests in front of their
homestead's main structure. This photo is from an 
1892 issue of Demorest's Magazine.

By the 1890s, Florida's cities offered growing lists of amenities that eased daily life for residents. Not so for people who lived far from urban centers. Some Florida Crackers deep in the backwoods had primitive living arrangements. 

One of the clearest examples of this, that I've come across, is an 1892 article written by archeologist Clarence Bloomfield Moore for Demorest's Family Magazine. Moore made yearly trips to Florida for sport activities or to conduct antiquities research. Each year he stopped to visit a Cracker friend who lived on the shores of Lake Harney in the east central part of the state. The1892 article is about one of these visits.

You can read the magazine article on the Florida Memory website. My focus in this post is on the living conditions of a family identified only as Captain Mansfield, his "old woman" (no name or relationship provided), a hired worker named Grant, and an unnamed young woman with a baby. The young mother was introduced as a relative of the Captain's.

The Mansfield homestead consisted of the following:

• a one-room cabin made of palmetto thatch, with a palmetto lean-to attached to the back;

• a palmetto-roofed barn with a loft and with walls made of animal skins;

• an outdoor, open-air kitchen that had a roof, if you can call it that. You can see what I mean in the photo at the end of this post. 

Moore said the assembled group lived contentedly on the lakeshore in this ramshackle collection of buildings. Mansfield and the older woman slept in the one-room cabin, the younger woman and the baby resided in the lean-to, and the hired worker slept in the barn loft. 

If you look at the group photo, everyone does seem somewhat laid-back as they listen to the Captain tell stories of Seminole War days. He was a Civil War veteran as well as a Seminole War veteran. To me, he doesn't look old enough to have fought in any but the third of the Seminole Wars. But looks can deceive. The "old woman" appears quite aged in a close-up photo you'll see if you read the article.

In Moore's story, the Captain and the older woman come across as likeable, talkative, and welcoming to their visitors. Moore and/or his traveling companions (not sure who's who among the visitors) seem equally at home in the photo, accepted even by one of the guard dogs who initially greeted the Northerners with bared teeth. The young woman and hired worker don't have voices in the story but are included in the group photo.

Neighbors were nonexistent. Moore says the homestead was the only habitation around the entire lake, a nine-mile body of water with 11 miles of shoreline. The nearest thing to a settlement was a small community named Geneva, three miles away. Even today, Geneva's population is less than 3,000 people.

I can't even begin to understand the work required just to survive -- just to make sure there was enough food, water, and shelter to sustain life on the homestead. I can't imagine cooking in what passed for a kitchen. Or sleeping surrounded by palmetto fronds that harbored all kinds of insects. How did the family ride out storms and deal with year-round mosquitos? What happened if they became ill? To say this family lived close to nature is an understatement.

I also want to know more about the relationships among what, at first glance, appears to be a mismatched assortment of people. Ones who looked out for each other in wild surroundings. Who heard bird call in the morning and saw star-studded skies at night. Who shared a hard life with a seeming contentment that escapes so many in our modern age. 

This photo of a Florida homesteader
 in her kitchen is from an 1892 issue
of Demorest's Magazine.

Read between lines

Regional fairs were popular events in 
pioneer Florida. (Gerri Bauer photo)

About 260,000 people lived in Florida in 1879. They rattled around in the state's 67,760 square miles. For comparison, the state's current population is about 22 million -- 22,000,000 versus 260,000. 

The state in 1879 was basically empty. Regional social or other events were limited. People were more focused on survival. And intrastate travel was challenging and time-consuming.

But residents flocked to gatherings that did take place and made the most of them. That's clear in an 1879 Florida Agriculturist newspaper article about that year's Central Florida Fair. Which, for some reason, took place in Tallahassee in northern Florida.

I don't know about fairs where you live, but in my area entries into the county fair food division have dwindled over the years. They're almost down to nothing. Imagine my surprise when I read that Mrs. W.H. Gibson entered "355 articles, all prepared by the same lady" at the 1879 fair. Her entries included 117 types of preserves and 82 varieties of jelly. 

Even weirder is how one item, a jar of watermelon citron preserves, was noted to be 25 years old. Did competitors save their items and enter them year after year in one giant pile? They must have. Because Mrs. Gibson wasn't an outlier.

Mrs. W.H. Scott entered 220 kinds of jellies, preserves, syrups, marmalades and other items. Mrs. T.J. Young bemoaned how she only had 116 varieties to enter because several jars broke during her journey to Tallahassee from Thomasville, Georgia. Other things were too difficult to transport. I wonder what they were. Among the items that did make it were an intricately carved and preserved watermelon rind basket and seven kinds of wine.

The fresh fruit and vegetable divisions were also popular categories. In these areas, people seemed to enter a lesser number of goods per person. Several outstanding competitors, most of them men, were listed by name and type of entry or entries.

This was a time when members of local black populations often weren't dignified by given name in or out of print. I was glad to read that, "Three very large and fine pumpkins were put on exhibition by Becky Pope, a colored woman of this county."

Not sure why there was a need to mention race. But it was a very different time, almost 150 years distant from our 21st century eyes. I credit the reporter for including Becky's name and the editors for keeping it in the story. Their actions gave her an identity and preserved it through time. 

Read between the lines, though. The precise wording could have constituted a slight snub or simply an acceptance of local tradition. Becky's name is presented in a less-respectful way than dictated by the era's formal naming conventions. The women who entered all the preserves were each identified by their husband's initials. That's how married women were named in public and in print at that time and into the 20th century. Names of unmarried, presumably white, competitors at the 1879 fair were given in full and preceded by the title Miss. 

We don't know if Becky was single or married, but we do know her full name. That's more than we can say for the married women whose preserves and jellies were entered under their husbands' names. We don't know anything personal at all about the lady who entered 355 items except that her husband's name was W.H. Gibson.

All in all, I was intrigued to see the acknowledgement of black competitors in print only two years after Reconstruction ended. Another part of the article reported that "Several loaves of light bread and other articles in this department were entered by colored women for prizes, against their fairer competitors."

The use of the word "fairer" instead of "white" could have been an intended slight against the black women. Or not. Maybe that was the only way the reporter was able to mention the black women's entries and get it past the editors. Ditto for how Becky Pope was named. I'm a retired journalist. I know how the profession operates  - or operated decades ago, anyway. I don't consider today's bias-driven news to be real journalism.

Back to the fair. No word on who won the bread competition, although all entries were deemed "very creditable." The reporter mentioned that an awards list was issued separately by the fair.

The article goes on and on, listing numerous people - primarily men - and their entries of fruits, vegetables, grains and livestock. The fair must have been a fairly recent initiative, because it was proclaimed a "complete success" and everyone believed it had a bright future. I wish the future of race relations had proved as promising. And I wish I knew the given names of those ladies who produced such marvelous preserves.