Relic road was modern marvel

Vehicles aren't allowed, but you can hike a one-mile section
of the 1917 Pershing Highway. (Photo credit: Gerri Bauer)

A sign at the trailhead explains the history of the road once
known as Pershing Highway. (Photo credit: Gerri Bauer)

We're super-sized in so many ways in our modern lives. A giant, single-serve soft drink comes close to the size of a whole bucket used to haul water back in the day. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But serving sizes are, to me, the most obvious sign of our gluttony for bigger, better, more, more, more.

I never considered highways as testaments to the oversizing of our culture. Yet one close look at the 1917 Pershing Highway archaeological site makes me think otherwise.

What a narrow strip of a road. Certain 21st century vehicles would hang off its edges. The tiny-car movement I noticed in recent years seems to have dwindled, no pun intended. In my region, at least, I see far more large pickups and SUVs than I do small cars.

Automobiles were basically one size when Florida inmates built the Pershing Highway, part of which is now an interpretive trail between DeLand and Daytona Beach. Using the bench in the first photo for scale, you can see how narrow the brick roadway is.

In its heyday, the highway was a marvel and technical achievement that served as the main route between the two cities. Before the road connected them, a trip from one to the other could take an entire day. Even though we call it a highway today, in its time it was simply known as either the DeLand Road or the Daytona Road, depending on which way you were traveling.

Think for a minute, what it must have been like to travel the brick paved road in the 19-teen years. Nothing but a slim brick path across sandhills, tangled hammocks, and wetlands. No street lights, traffic signals, gas stations or convenience stores.

The signage at the trail's entrance says the "pea gravel" concrete on each side of the brick was added in the 1920s, likely to allow two cars to pass one another. The initial road was one-lane. Even widened, it remained unlighted. A trip at night must have been a lonely journey through a densely wooded, unpopulated area. The highway still looks isolated today.

The road that appears so desolate to me was a sign of progress in the early days. So much so, that it was featured on Volusia County's 1917 license plates, according to author Ronald Williamson in his excellent book, Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills (History Press, 2008). The book is a collection of history-focused columns Williamson wrote as a journalist. In the article about Pershing Highway, he says the old road was uncovered when wildfires burned through the region in 1998.

Before that, vegetation had swallowed and hid this vestige of an earlier time. Today, you can hike a one-mile section known as the Pershing Highway Interpretive Trail. The trail is part of what is now Tiger Bay State Forest.

Named after World War I General John Pershing, the highway was abandoned in 1947. Adjacent U.S. 92 made for much easier traveling. You can see the parallel roadways in the third photo in this post.

I'm far from an expert on automobiles, but the cars of the late 1940s had to be boat-like in comparison to vehicles of the late teens and early 1920s. So, too, the difference between narrow Pershing Highway and four-lane U.S. 92.

Even the grassy median on the modern highway is wider than the old road. Both are dwarfed by roads and bridges being constructed in the 21st century. Size marches on.

The old highway was abandoned when U.S. 92, seen behind
the sign, opened in the 1940s. (Photo credit: Gerri Bauer)

One-stop shopping of yore

You can visit this historic general store
(Photo credit: Florida Trailblazer)

Old-time general stores offered one-stop shopping to pioneers and settlers. Kind of like Amazon and big box outlets do today. With some differences. Personality, for one. The general store of yore functioned as a community news hub, post office, and gathering place. The multiple roles made each general store unique and far more than just a place to buy coffee. Proprietors knew patrons by name.

True, the merchandise selection was limited. Overnight shipping didn't exist for special orders. General stores filled the needs that existed in their time. The one pictured with the post and featured in a Florida Trailblazer video is the C.C. Smith store from the 1920s.

You can visit the Smith general store at the Pioneer Florida Museum and Village north of Dade City, which is in Pasco County. The video description says the store served the Lacoochee area. Wikipedia describes Lacoochee as a "census-designated place," but it seems to have a rich history that can be explored via links at a History of Pasco County webpage.

I've yet to visit the Pioneer Florida Museum and Village. When I do, I'll be sure to sit down in that chair on the store's front porch, and rest awhile.

Of life, death, and loss of a loved one

In pioneer days, communication was by letter and telegram.
Today, we use text messages, email, and phone calls.
Photo credit: Gerri Bauer

In some ways, we're not so different than the pioneers. Many modern Floridians live far from extended family. When a loved one dies, we communicate by text message, emails, and phone calls instead of by letter or telegram. But the message, the hurt, and the feeling of loss are the same. The distance from close kin produces aches atop the existing sadness.

Another similarity shows up in how neighbors step in to help in the absence of family. If you're lucky enough to have a supportive spouse, good friends, and helpful neighbors, you're blessed. I am. 

This all came home for me ten days ago, when I lost my beloved mother. Next steps and care for my elderly father landed on me with an urgency. My nearest sibling lives more than 700 miles away, the others more than 1,000. Even I live 75 miles from the town my parents were in during their final years.

Like in pioneer days, distant people aren't always able to drop and run when and where needed. Then, transportation difficulties ensued. Today, our unfeeling world interferes. In both eras, financial and health matters factored in. Let's just say I'm grateful 75 miles is nothing today, in terms of distance. I glad I am and was available to the man and woman who raised me with love.

My husband, friends, and neighbors, both in my town and my parents' town, have propped me up with their care and help, just as spouses, friends, and neighbors did in pioneer days. Had the Lord granted earthly life to the two children I lost to miscarriages, I'm sure they, too, would have been by my side, as children in the past were with their parents. As children are today. 

My mother loved flowers. Maybe that's why the floral aspects of pioneer accounts of local deaths stay with me. In an 1878 letter to her son, who lived more than 1,000 miles away, DeLand innkeeper Lucy Mead Parce wrote about how a coffin was trimmed. The account is from The Parce Letters: Voices From the Past (Gerri Giovanelli Bauer, West Volusia Historical Society, 2004).  

"Mrs. Thomas's baby (4 weeks old) died last night. Miss Deane sent over for me to come and help trim the coffin last evening. We have some beautiful fine white wildflowers & I made a wreath and cross of those & geranium leaves."

In her memoir, Pioneering in Hillsborough County, Fla. (Daniels Publishers, 1972), Clyde Mansell Gibson mentioned flowers in a recounting of her Aunt Emma's 1900 death. The six-year-old Clyde and her siblings and mother:

"... cut all the flowers we had and took them to Miss Grace and her mother to arrange in wreaths and other floral arrangements. They used a lot of arbor vitae for greenery and made everything look beautiful because Aunt Emma was a lover of flowers and had coral vine and honeysuckle growing at either end of the front porch." (40)

Bereavement flowers today are factory farmed and corporately arranged. They're beautiful with a sanitized perfection light years from the messiness of real life. My mother loved sweet peas. I plan to plant them on her grave. 

Modern parallel to sad chapter

The Florida guide was part of the Federal Writers' Project.

I was casting about for a topic this month, and couldn't settle on anything. I kept being drawn back to an anecdote in the 1939 WPA guide to Florida featured in November's post.

The episode details an incident from the Reconstruction Era of the late 1860s to 1870s. I wondered if the authors included it to illustrate how much more civilized everyone had become by the 1930s. The problem is, the anecdote caught my attention because it reminded me of where we are today, in 2017-almost-2018. And that's a sad fact.

Within the WPA guide are road-trip itineraries identified as numbered tours. Tour 7 is 20 pages of tidbits about the area that parallels Florida's northern boundary. The episode that stayed with me is one paragraph on page 443 of Tour 7.

Readers learn that violence flared during Reconstruction in the city of Marianna and the surrounding areas of the county. Several killings took place. I assume the authors mean lynchings but that isn't specified. Only the fact that killings occurred. Opinions varied as to why they occurred, and the polarization is what struck me as so contemporary:

• Some laid the blame on "the activities of unscrupulous Bureau officials and politicians." 

• A bishop from Massachusetts, "who had first-hand knowledge of the situation, placed the guilt on the shoulders of the planters of Jackson County." 

• A judge, "an aristocrat of Marianna, claimed that 'ruffians' from the border States were responsible."

• A certain preacher and legislator believed "disputes over farm land caused much of the disorder, as poor whites objected to Negro ownership of choice farms."

• Another man, "a wealthy Bostonian living in Jacksonville, declared the lawlessness was caused by carpetbaggers."

How much finger-pointing can ostensible leaders do? They looked the other way, blamed everyone else, pitted two less-privileged groups against one another, and seemed set in their own opinions. The reader can almost sense the tension simmering among these one-percenters.

Each person was in his own camp. Just like today. The Northerners and Southerners were at odds, similar to how Blue and Red adherents are today. I wouldn't be surprised to learn fake news was thrown about back then, too.

The WPA authors are silent about resolutions. The very next paragraph is about an abandoned inn standing in overgrown grounds.

We don't yet have any resolutions to the polarization and incivility of our times. I have to remain optimistic. In part, it's my nature. In part, it's how I stay hopeful that someday, maybe, love really will prevail.

WPA Guidebook Dishes Up Tasty Tidbits

This photo of men planting celery in Florida is from Florida,
A Guide to the Southernmost State. 
(Photo credit: Farm Security Administration)

Since we're in the season of celebratory eating, I have a good excuse for venturing into one of my favorite topics. Food! Today's post looks at some culinary and agricultural tidbits from mid-1930s Florida.

My source is Florida, A Guide to the Southernmost State. Published in 1939, it was a Works Project Administration initiative written by authors in the Federal Writers' Project. Briefly, both federal programs gave people the dignity of jobs during the Great Depression. 

The writers' project created guidebooks to the United States. In doing so, the authors captured - and preserved - portraits in time. I treasure my copy. It's a snapshot of Florida in the 1930s. Many modern residents and visitors wouldn't recognize the place. The book's foreward says Florida "is frequently referred to as the last American frontier." In the 1930s!

The book offers information on Florida history as well as then-modern culture. That makes it even more appealing to me.

These gleanings about food are mainly from the scenic driving tours the authors laid out for visitors.

• In 1918, farmers in tiny Hastings earned $20 a barrel for their potatoes because there was a potato scarcity in the North (355). That's the equivalent of about $350 in 2017. Fun fact: Hastings is still known as Florida's potato capital.
• In springtime, even yards of city houses were planted with celery and lettuce in Sanford, "capital of the Florida celery belt" (360). 
• 5,000 to 8,000 pounds of crystallized fruit peel were produced every week during the winter season in Davenport's Citrus Candy Factory (367). Let me say, if you've never tasted homemade or locally made crystallized citrus peel, you are missing a treat. I made some from tangerine peels before my Robinson tangerine tree succumbed to citrus greening. Yum. 
• Here's what was in typical lunch buckets of workers at a cypress mill in Sanderson: cornbread, black-eyed peas boiled with salt pork, and a jar of cane syrup. The worker poured the syrup into the lunch bucket's lid and sopped it up with the cornbread. Occasionally, the workers ate greens and bacon, pork chops and beans, biscuits, boiled sweet potatoes, and cowpeas (field peas) (423).
• An "All-Day Sing" was a big social event in Chipley. Winners were determined by popular acclaim ("volume and enthusiasm"). At noon, everyone stopped to eat the dinners they'd brought from home: fried chicken, rabbit, squirrel, vegetables, coffee, and "mounds of cornbread" (445).

Was anybody eating celery or white potatoes at the All-Day Sing? Peeling a tangerine? The different sections of Florida were somewhat isolated from one another, but still. I also don't get why entries about backwoods gatherings or work lunches, in this book or others, never seem to mention fresh citrus as a dessert. 

It's all enough to make me hungry. For food ... and for more social history.

South Miami a city within a city

Watch this video on YouTube

We all know about Miami. We hear a lot about Miami proper and South Beach. But South Miami, not so much.

I didn't even realize there was a separate city named South Miami. So when I saw this video while browsing on YouTube, I was definitely interested. A Florida city I'd never heard of! Even though I've likely driven through it on one of the few trips my husband and I have made to Miami.

South Miami's motto is "The City of Pleasant Living." The city has about 10,000 residents and is  near Coral Gables. That, too, is a separate city. But Coral Gables has a fairly visible profile and independent identity. To me, that's partly because I associate it with Coral Castle, an attraction that actually isn't in Coral Gables. It isn't even in Miami proper. But that's another blog post.

Wikipedia reports that South Miami residents incorporated in the 1920s in hopes of staving off the "booming city" just north of them. Miami swallowed it anyway, by growing around it in influence and name recognition, if not in actual city borders.

As a municipality, South Miami went through some rough times. The city started off at 6 miles in size, but reduced its borders twice and now is about 2 miles in size. Border shrinkage wasn't the only issue. Read the history on the city's website to learn how South Miami was "saved by a fire engine with no flames in sight!"

Now that I've been introduced to South Miami, I wonder how many other cities are nestled within the metropolis I consider one giant city of Miami. More fodder for future blog posts, I'm sure.

Hurricanes haunt for a long time

 The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane pushed this
 rescue train off its tracks.
(Photo credit: State Archives of Florida)

Hurricane Irma knocked me right off my twice-a-month posting schedule. The storm also knocked out my power for almost six days.

That's minor compared to what Irma destroyed in the Florida Keys, as I'm sure you've heard. The only positive news was the low number of deaths.

A similarly devastating storm struck the Keys in 1935. That time, hundreds of people died. Sophisticated weather warning systems hadn't yet been developed. In Florida's Hurricane History, Jay Barnes writes that a warning at the time described the system as a tropical disturbance that might have winds of hurricane force. That was a day before the storm known as the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane slammed into the Keys with winds higher than 150 mph.

Reports of that storm terrify even today. Barnes writes that a rescue train that carried evacuees - including veterans building the Overseas Highway - was tossed off the tracks by a wall of water at least 17 feet high.

Barnes,  Florida Weather author Morton Winsberg, and most every account of the storm include the first-person observations of survivor J.E. Duane. He managed a fishing camp on Long Key and was an observer for the Weather Bureau. His report noted that he observed houses being lifted off foundations, moved, and broken apart by wind and water. 

Caught waist-deep in water, Duane was swept along until he grabbed onto a coconut tree's palm fronds and hung on "for dear life."  He was knocked unconscious. When he awoke - still in the tree - saw that he was 20 feet above the ground.

You can read more excerpts of Duane's report in a Monthly Weather Review article on NOAA's Hurricane Research Division website.

Eleven members of a family named Russell on Matecumbe Key also survived, Barnes writes. More than 50 other members of the extended family perished in the storm. Overall, more than 400 people died including many of the veterans.

I remember blogging about early Florida hurricanes last year after Matthew struck my area. Here's hoping it's the last time for a long, long while that I turn to that subject.