Little House on the Florida frontier

The Wilders in Florida. Laura doesn't seem happy 
to be here. Not sure of the original source of this
 photo or who gets credit. I found it on Pinterest. 

I'm a longtime fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame. But never, ever, did I realize until recently that she lived on the Florida frontier for a brief time.

I was so surprised when I read that fact in the book Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Tystad Koupal, editor, South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017. The book is available at https://www.sdhspress.com/books/pioneer-girl-perspectives. Laura's short Florida stay is mentioned in passing, but I halted in mid-sentence and set out to learn more.

Laura and her husband, Almanzo Wilder, and their daughter, Rose, spent part of 1891 and 1892 in the small, northern Florida town of Westville, which is tiny even now. The population today is less than 300. But Westville proclaims its sliver of Wilder history, I'm glad to say. So do other people. A Google search turns up all kinds of information.

There's a Laura Ingalls Wilder Homestead Park you can visit on County Road 163 in Westville. A historical marker (online at https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=95031) stands at the site of the Wilder homestead. It provides a brief history of Laura's time in Florida. Never have I been so anxious to read a sign. A little disappointed, maybe, to learn from it that the Wilders returned to the Dakota plains because Florida was too humid for Laura.

The sign also says Rose, as an adult, wrote a fictionalized account of the Florida sojourn and that the story won an O.Henry prize in 1922.  Can't wait to read the piece, which is titled "Innocence."

The Wilders made the odd detour to Florida because family was already living here. A 2012 article in the Chipley, Florida, newspaper about Laura says relatives still live in the area.

The article also includes an interesting comment, attributed to Laura, about her stay in Florida. It makes me think more than the humidity affected her perspective of her new home:

"... we went to live in the piney woods of Florida, where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, where alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at the time and at that place a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than these...”

She wasn't really a Yankee, of course, at least not in the sense that I think of Yankees (being one myself). But Westville is in Holmes County in the farthest reaches of northern Florida. It's practically a part of Alabama. In the early 1890s, locals indeed might have been openly curious - and possibly resentful - about a Midwestern/Yankee woman trying to put down roots in the rural Old South.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum (https://lauraingallswilderhome.com/) in Missouri offers a booklet about the family's Westville period. I've put it on my to-be-read list. I'm curious about what Laura writes about life on the Florida frontier.

One of the main reasons I like Laura's autobiography and novels about growing up on the American frontier is her attention to the details of daily living. To think she turned that lens of observation on pioneer Florida is a treasure, indeed.

---

Postscript, 2018: I found and read the short story, "Innocence," through the Internet Archive digital library (https://archive.org). My take is that the locals were suspicious and possibly unfriendly to Laura during her stay in Florida. The cultural gaps had to be  enormous. Also, the short story has a sinister plot twist that I hope was fictional and not based on a true incident.

Postscript, 2020: I bought and read the booklet about Westville and the effort to uncover history about the family's time in frontier Florida. Here's a link to my post about it: https://frontier-florida.blogspot.com/2020/11/little-house-on-florida-frontier.html. 

A possum in the applesauce

This pioneer photo on page 87 of Stuart on the St. Lucie, A Pictorial History
is credited to Robert Gladwin.

How I wish I had a photo to go with the headline: A possum in the applesauce. But Southeast Florida pioneer Homer Hine Stuart Jr. had other things on his mind the night he encountered the marsupial in 1886. Namely, ridding his bungalow of the critter before his visiting mother woke up and saw it.

Homer described the scene in a letter to his fiancee, Margaret, who stayed in civilized Athens, N.Y.  She declined his invitations to come to the frontier town of Stuart on the banks of the St. Lucie River. The city carries Homer's surname to this day. Yet Homer homesteaded on the river for only a handful of years. He and Margaret got married in 1888 and settled in the North.

This image appears on
the title page of  Stuart
on the St. Lucie.

Before I return to the possum story, I first want to credit the book in which I found it. Parts of Homer's letter are transcribed in the wonderful Stuart on the St. Lucie, A Pictorial History, by Sandra Henderson Thurlow (Sewall's Point Co., 2001).

The possum story gets better, and Homer's writing is all that's needed. So let me step out of the way:

"...At last I got to sleep but only for a little while, I thought all the dishes were being broken & there was a Possum on the table with his idiotic smile. Of course I had to make the best of it & while mother sat eating her breakfast & saying how delicious the applesauce was & in this climate what a perfect substitute for butter, I agreed with her & to prove it ate some more of the delicate flavored applesauce thinking all the time of what she would think if I told her the picture of the night before. An Opposum standing in the dish of applesauce & munching the wing of a chicken, his tail resting in the sugar bowl."

Truly, I couldn't have made that up. And I write fiction when not blogging.

Thurlow writes that Homer became disenchanted with pioneering soon after his widowed mother left. He homesteaded in Florida for only five years. Several other family members also owned riverfront land in Stuart, so the city name may also reflect their influence. Not a one, though, can top Homer's possum story.

School days - so distant, so near

These students and teachers posed for a photo outside their
South Florida schoolhouse in the 1890s.
Photo credit: Florida Memory, State Archives of Florida

Two things stood out as I browsed school news from more than a century ago. One, people spouted opinions about education with vigor. Two, the sub-collegiate curriculum -- aka high school -- in the academy that grew to become Florida State University was surprisingly challenging to my 21st century eyes.

Really, I should make it three things. Third, teacher pay was pretty poor. School salaries in Ocala in 1897 ranged from $25 to $50 a month. The modern equivalent is $731 to $1,462. That was for a seven-month term.

The salaries were described in an Ocala Evening Star article about the July 5, 1897 Marion County Board of Public Instruction meeting. Nothing indicates whether the salary range applied to teachers in both white and black schools. These were the days of segregation. A separate article on the same news page noted the 40 teachers present at the opening exercises of "The Colored Normal" in Witness hall. The Normal was a teaching institute, but it seems it was conducted in a church. By the second day, 75 teachers were in attendance. No word on money. The article received a fraction of the space allocated to the board's affairs.

Downstate in Titusville a few years later, a letter writer in the Jan. 26, 1900 Florida Star
lamented he way his "former colleagues on the school board" wasted money. R.N. Andrews of Cocoa chastised officials for spending  more than $600 on charts, maps and books when they could have procured the same supplies at a much lower cost. In his long letter, he wrote he'd been contacted by numerous people who had complaints about school business.

That same year, 1900, back in Ocala, residents were protesting a proposed special school tax district. They wanted an election on the district postponed and the district's boundaries redrawn. You can read their reasons in the Sept. 6, 1900 issue of the Ocala Evening Star.

While adults agitated, students sweated at their studies, if the curriculum in the April 18, 1901 edition of The Weekly Tallahassean is any indication. A long article about the West Florida Seminary mentioned classes taken by students in the sub-collegiate course. These students had to be at least 12 to enroll, and had to "pass through three years of hard study" to advance to the collegiate level.

Their courses included: grammar, rhetoric, literature, business and higher arithmetic, bookkeeping and commercial law, algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, civil government, physiology and hygiene, botany, physical and political geography, history and Latin.

I suspect "business and higher arithmetic" was akin to the "finite mathematics" I took to fulfill the Quantitative Learning requirement when I returned to college in middle age. Granted, I was rusty and years out of practice. But the memory of calculating interest on mortgages, and other such business exercises, gives me renewed respect for those long-ago learners.

Eldora a Florida ghost town

Known as Eldora House, this structure was built in 1877.
It was a private residence and a boarding house.
Photo credit: Gerri Bauer

We live in a time of change. Pioneer Floridians did, too, especially regarding travel. Changes in transportation could doom a town. The small community of Eldora is a perfect example. Its fortunes rose and fell in a little over two decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The thriving waterfront community relied on the river as its main highway. The town fronted the Indian River, which at the time was a main thoroughfare. Eldora lost significance - and population - through a combination of factors. Water transportation faded as railroads expanded. A freeze killed the town's citrus crop, and a year later a hurricane struck. Finally, the Intracoastal Waterway was dug, which meant Eldora no longer sat on the main transit route.

The town faded. It lost people and even its name. Originally, the settlement had been known as Pumpkin Point.

During its short existence in the last quarter of the 19th century, Eldora had a post office, school, aviary, orange groves and a business that used palmetto berries to make a medicinal syrup. I learned all that when touring the site many years ago in order to write a newspaper article. That's when I took the photo that accompanies this blog post. The crumbling structure in the photo was built in 1877 and called Eldora House. It served as a private residence and then a boarding house.

A park ranger explained the town's history during that visit. That's because Eldora in modern times became part of Canaveral National Seashore. That gives Eldora somewhat of a happy ending, compared to other Florida ghost towns.

One of the few remaining structures there during my tour has been restored. Known as the Eldora State House, it's now a museum and may be visited on weekends. You can learn about the town and the people who lived there. And stand on the waterfront and wonder what it was like to live in a time and place where waterways formed your only link to the wider world.

Outpost, outlaw, island a unique mix

Ted Smallwood, seated, talks with Ernest Coe in Smallwood
store in this undated photo that appears in the 1968 book,
Man in the Everglades. Coe was a driving forced behind
establishment of  Everglades National Park.

You have to want to go to Chokoloskee Island. It's not on the way to anywhere else. South of Everglades City, it's in the part of Southwest Florida known as the Ten Thousand Islands.

It's remote now. Imagine one hundred years ago. Chokoloskee Island is one of those places that lend credence to the idea of frontier Florida as a slice of the Old West, albeit with a different climate. Renegades really did hide out, shoot it out and slink around. White settlers and Native Americans stepped warily around one another after fighting three wars between the 1830s and 1850s.

One famous outlaw story is associated with Chokoloskee Island and in particular with the waterfront trading post known as Smallwood store. My post isn't focused on the outlaw. His name was Edgar Watson and his story is overall scary. You can read about him in the island's Wikipedia page and in the novel Killing Mr. Watson mentioned in the video that is linked below.

This post is more about the store, which I visited with my husband some years ago. It's a historic site and museum now.

Ted Smallwood opened the general store/post office in 1906. History says he was known for having a mutually respectful relationship with the Seminoles in the area. You have to remember, the 19-aughts were only 50 years after the end of the Third Seminole War. In modern perspective, it would be like something that happened in the 1960s. Plenty of folk were still around who remembered the previous era. Many Seminoles and white settlers weren't on the friendliest of terms.

The trading post both was and wasn't a Little House on the Prairie-type store. For one thing, the back porch extends right out over Chokoloskee Bay. The place was extremely isolated. Only about ten families lived on the island. Homesteaders picked up their mail at the store and shopped for goods like lanterns, fabric, and farm and fishing equipment. Indians  glided up on the waterfront side in canoes and traded furs and hides.

The store remained open until the 1980s and still retains its original look. I was amazed when I walked through. Soon as I dig out (I mean find) our photos from that trip I'll post some of them. In the meantime, you can see a great virtual tour on the Smallwood website.

Life on Chokoloskee Island in the early 1900s was unlike anywhere else. In some ways, it still is today.

Watch a video about the Smallwood Store at
the link below (Photo credit: Smallwood website). 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwe21ifG5U

Heavy music on a joyous day

This ad appeared on the same page of the
April 21, 1916 Pensacola Journal as the
article about Easter music at St. Michael's.

Catholics tend to fall into two camps when it comes to church music - traditional or contemporary. Me, I like Gregorian chant. Some was performed at Easter services at St. Michael's in Pensacola a century ago. Along with a great deal of other music.

First, a digression. In case you're wondering why the blog illustration depicts Easter finery instead of something music-related. I had nothing to accompany the musical selections listed below, is one reason. The other is that the illustration appears on the same newspaper page as the article about the St. Michael's Easter service. Both are on Page 3 of the April 21, 1916 edition of the Pensacola Journal. At first glance, I thought I was looking at 1950s fashions. I rechecked the newspaper date, and sure enough it's 1916.

Pensacola has many strengths but it's hardly a hotbed of fashion forwardness. I'm intrigued enough to add women's fashion trends of the 19-teen years to my "future explorations" file.

Back to the music. The newspaper reporter said the choir "prepared a brilliant musical program for its part in the divine services Easter Sunday." The music was set to begin a half-hour before solemn High Mass. Another performance was scheduled for Easter evening, and the entire community was invited, including non-Catholics. The article makes a point of noting that fact. A crowd was expected, and extra chairs brought in.

Here's the musical program:

• Vidi Aquam (Gregorian)
• Regina Coeli (Giorza)
• Kyrie (Emerson)
• Gloria (Ganns)
• Credo (Ganns)
• Sanctus (Emerson)
• Benedictus (Gounod)
• “Pilgrims’ Chorus” and “Evening Star” from Tannhauser (Wagner)
• “Sweet Reverie” (Tobani-Getz)
• “As God Ordained,” quartet for strongs (strings?) (Muted)
• “Largo” (Handel)
• Postlude, “The Heavens Are Telling” (Handel)

Instruments were five violins, a cornet, flute, cello, bass, clarinet and organ. The musicians were mentioned by name. The violinists were O’Brien Motto, Bertram Coleman, Bertram Dannheisser, Max Heinberg and Fred Fairchild. On the cornet was Robert Diaz, with A. Distasia on flute, A. Diaz on cello, Benj. Fairchild on bass, a Mr. Brown on clarinet and A.C. Reilly as organist. No word on individual members of the chorus. Perhaps too many to list. The congregation was expected to sing even at the evening program.

The performances at the church were said to be the continuance of a "time-honored custom." St. Michael's in 1916 was already a historic parish, having been established in 1781. Today, St. Michael's is a basilica.

After reading such a glowing write-up, I dug up renditions on YouTube of several of the selections. Oh, my. Just about all were quite heavy. Much has changed in Catholic church music over the last century. For the better.

First magic kingdom?

From the Henry Plant Museum video:
  'The Tampa Bay Hotel: Florida's First Magic Kingdom'

In the 19th century, Florida was portrayed elsewhere in the nation as an exotic, tropical locale. So developers gave people what they expected. A case in point is railroad magnate Henry Plant, whose resort hotel is dubbed in the accompanying video as Florida's first magic kingdom.

One of the speakers in the Henry Plant Museum video suggests that 19th century travelers' expectations of the extraordinary is one reason Plant gave his resort hotel a Moorish look. His Tampa Bay Hotel even had minarets.

I've written about the Tampa Bay Hotel in the past - or rather, about the museum housed within the building. The National Historical Landmark is now part of the University of Tampa. Today's post shares the link to the video about the hotel's history. The 15-minute video goes into architectural detail about the structure and explains what happened to it after the glitterati of the 19th century moved on to other playgrounds.

The hotel story is replete with superlatives that are eye-opening when compared to the lives and houses of the average 19th century Floridian. The hotel had 500 rooms on 6 acres, and was furnished with European goods shipped to the site in 41 trainloads. The goods included 30,000 square yards of carpet. According to the video, the Tampa Bay Hotel was Florida's first all-electric, steam-heated and fireproof hotel. The grounds included tropical landscaping, a horse track, golf course and spaces for musical and theatrical performances.

All this glamour was unveiled on Feb. 5, 1891, at an opening ball for 2,000 guests. The New York Times covered the gala.

Enjoy this look at an increasingly distant past: