Pioneering Palm Beach

by Ginger L Pedersen

  The state of Florida wanted to lure new residents, so in 1855, the state created the Internal Improvement Trust Fund. The state had more than 21 million acres of land to grant to entities and settlers who improved the land through cultivation and drainage or to dredge canals and build railroads to bring eager new settlers. Through several court battles after the Civil War, the fund found itself deeply in debt. From Philadelphia appeared Hamilton Disston, who offered in 1881 (the same year the Deweys arrived in Florida) to purchase 4 million acres of submerged and low lands for $1 million in cash. The state accepted the offer, and the Internal Improvement fund was saved. It made Disston the largest private landowner in the world.

  Settlers could also purchase land through Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund, through the railroad and drainage companies, or be granted land through the Homestead Act. The 1862 Homestead Act allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of public land for free if they resided on the land for five years and improved it by farming or clearing the land for cultivation. If they did not want to wait the five years, settlers could purchase the homesteaded land for $1.25 per acre after living on it for six months and improving the land through cultivation and construction of a home. Union soldiers could also reduce the five years by the amount of time they had served in the army during the Civil War.

  The first stop on the itinerary for many a northern visitor or new resident was Jacksonville. Situated a few miles from the coast on the St. Johns River, the city had seen many different flags fly over its streets, including Spanish, French, British, and even the short-lived Republic of Florida. Jacksonville changed hands several times between the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War; during the Reconstruction era, the city experienced a resurgence in prosperity. Northern doctors began to recommend the Jacksonville area to winter-weary northerners as early as the 1870s; some well-known people who sought its winter warmth included Mary Todd Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s widow, who visited in 1875; Henry M. Flagler, the Standard Oil Company founder who hoped to help his ailing wife’s health; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, famed abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who took up residence in the nearby town of Mandarin. Stowe wrote in a letter from January 1872, “We begin to find our usual number of letters, wanting to know all this, that and the other, about Florida. All in good time, friends. Come down here once, and use your own eyes, and you will know more than we can teach you.”

  As the Deweys had made the decision to venture southward, the first question to arise was what would become of their beloved Bruno. Their earlier experiment with trying to give Bruno away had failed miserably, so the thought of such a breakup again was disheartening. Birdie wrote, “I began to think a way would open, and my heart felt lighter than it had at any time since we first began to talk Florida. If we could have Bruno with us, I no longer dreaded going to a land which, in my imaginings, had appeared to be teeming with unknown dangers.”

  After Fred spoke with the railway agent, Bruno was allowed to partake in the grand adventure, but it would be difficult and not without additional expense for Bruno’s passage. The biggest challenge in the long train journey to Florida was the numerous changes and transfers along the way. Because Bruno would be traveling in the baggage car, Fred had to see that Bruno was safely transferred to the next train at each stage of the journey. Birdie lamented that friends and neighbors had little confidence in their great Florida experiment, and with Bruno to boot! She felt that most of the people in their circle of friends fully expected them to return within a year, realizing the foolishness of their adventuresome ways.

  As the train journey started southward, Fred went to the train car where Bruno was traveling to see how the dog was faring on the journey. He found Bruno to be frantic and howling. But as soon as Bruno caught site of Fred, all was well—no doubt Bruno had thought that he was once again being sent away to live with strangers. The fate of Rebecca (the Dewey’s Blue Maltese cat) was something that bothered Birdie deeply. Taking a dog on such a journey to Florida was enough of a folly, but a cat would have been impossible. Birdie knew that, and she had given Rebecca to a neighbor who had done some domestic work for the Deweys. Birdie reflected on her difficult decision: “I bade her a tearful goodbye, and carried away an ache in my heart that I sometimes feel yet. Some day I hope to go across into cat-heaven and hunt her up. Then she can be made to understand why I was seemingly so hard-hearted as to go off and leave looking mournfully after me on that sad day so long ago. Maybe she knows now; I hope she does.”

  As the train chugged some 400 miles southward from Salem, Illinois, toward Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first transfer went well. Subsequent transfers were equally as successful. They boarded the “sleeper” train for the final 450 miles of the journey as they reached Jacksonville, just a few weeks before Christmas 1881. A cold snap had arrived with the Deweys, and the balmy weather they had dreamed of was just an illusion. Birdie wrote, “How startling, then, to feel our features pinched by nipping breezes as we stepped from the cars at last in the Sunny South! True, as we passed residences on our way to the hotel, we saw green trees and blooming flowers; but where were the balmy airs that in our dreams were always fanning the fadeless flowers in this Mecca of our hopes?”

  They settled into their Jacksonville hotel, welcomed by a roaring fire in the lobby, with Bruno staying in his kennel in a downstairs area. Birdie did not mention the hotel’s name, but the finest hotels at that time were the St. James Hotel and the Windsor Hotel; it is doubtful, though, that Fred and Birdie could have afforded such luxurious places. Their stay in Jacksonville was short, as Fred had a friend living farther south in St. Augustine. Although the two cities are well connected today by a leisurely thirty-five-mile drive via highway, the route in 1881 was quite different. The Deweys and Bruno boarded a steamer in Jacksonville for the trip upstream on the St. Johns River. Even though it may seem to be a shorter distance to take the ocean route to St. Augustine down the coast, sailing ships made for ocean passage were quite different than the steamers built to ply the calm river waters. Uncertain winds, high seas and sudden storms made ship travel on the ocean perilous at times. There was also no road or highway of any significance between the two cities, and such a wagon ride would have been long and tedious.

  The Deweys enjoyed the ride upstream on the St. Johns River, and Bruno also seemed to enjoy his first ride on such a craft. Fred and Birdie visited Bruno many times during the journey, as he was required to stay on the ship’s lower deck. Their destination was the small town of Tocoi, called “Decoy” by many, a settlement that had sprung up because of it being directly west of St. Augustine and situated on the St. Johns River. The steamers docked at the wharf, where the train met arriving passengers. From there, the Deweys boarded the tiny St. Johns Railroad, a narrow-gauge railway owned at that time by William Astor (of the wealthy New York Astor family) for the fifteen-mile jaunt over to St. Augustine on the coast. Birdie recalled, “There was no one about when we boarded the train; so Bruno followed us into the passenger coach, crept under the seat, doubling himself up like a shut knife, and, totally effaced by the time the conductor came around, rode first-class for once. It seemed such a treat for us all to be together as we journeyed, that our short ride across from ‘Decoy’ to the coast stands out in memory as the pleasantest part of the journey.” Today, Tocoi is all but abandoned, made obsolete when Henry M. Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railway directly from Jacksonville to St. Augustine. All that remains of Tocoi are some wood pilings where the train depot and wharf once stood, as well as a few abandoned dwellings.

  After a few days with Fred’s acquaintances, the Deweys secured a boardinghouse room in St. Augustine. It must have been terribly ironic that in this vast, unknown place of Florida, they were in America’s oldest city. The Deweys spent two weeks enjoying the scenery and getting used to Florida and its different sensations. Even Bruno had some learning to do about waters and creeks that looked pleasant:

&
nbsp; He promptly made a dash into one of the creeks as the tide was flowing in, and took a big drink. He was warm with running, and the water looked so inviting that he had taken a number of swallows before he tasted it. Then his antics were most comical. He snorted and shook his head till his ears flapped again, and rubbed at his nose, first with one paw and then with the other. After that one lesson he never again drank from a strange pool or stream without first tasting it very gingerly, then waiting a few seconds to make sure of the after-taste. But if he objected to the taste of salt water, he found no flaw in the feeling of it.

  The inspiring ocean breakers and the beach were loved by all three. Having been raised in interior states, undoubtedly the vastness of the ocean, with its smells of salt and crispness of breeze, alluded to the paradise the Deweys so sought. Although she remarked that “[s]ome days were quite chilly,” most days in December were warm enough for their summer clothing. St. Augustine, with its strong Spanish influence in architecture and design, had made it seem as if they were in a foreign country. Alas, Christmas arrived in this strange land, a green Christmas like they had never experienced: “It was a very strange Christmas to all three of us. The air was pleasantly warm, and green things, with roses and other flowers, were in sight in all directions.” They had wished to celebrate in the “Old Cathedral” (the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine) built in the 1790s. But the balmy salt air combined with good food found them fast asleep early in the evening. They awoke on Christmas morning to the sound of little boys marching down the street, banging their new Christmas drums.

  GATES OF ST. AUGUSTINE. The Deweys began their Florida journey in Jacksonville, arriving a few weeks before Christmas 1881. From Jacksonville, they traveled by steamship down the St. Johns River to St. Augustine. Courtesy Library of Congress.

  And so, the first few weeks of the great Florida experiment had passed, but the vacation holidays were fast coming to an end and life’s realities would soon emerge. Birdie wrote, “As soon as Christmas had passed, we, with that feeling of having turned a corner, common at such times, began to hasten our preparations to go on South.” Now the effort at earning a living and creating a home in the vast Florida wilderness was to begin, and with it new hardships and hurdles to be overcome.

  The Dreamer of Dreams

  As the Deweys’ Christmas holidays were coming to an end in St. Augustine, a cloud of uncertainty remained regarding where they would pioneer in Florida. They looked at several pieces of land in St. Augustine and the vicinity, but the irony of “pioneering” in the oldest city in America was something that did not escape Birdie: “We had inspected various tracts of land around St. Augustine, but had not found anything to which we felt particularly drawn. It seemed rather odd, too, to come south intending to pioneer, and then settle in or near what was the old sergeant at the Fort assured us was the oldest city in the Union.”

  So the Deweys decided to venture deeper into Florida’s wilds. Exactly where they tried pioneering remained a mystery for months. In Bruno, the story is related how the Deweys wanted to start an orange grove, so it seemed logical that they had relocated to somewhere in the middle of the state, since South Florida was a vast swamp unsuited for citrus groves. A massive land reclamation project was underway to drain lands in the middle of the state through Hamilton Disston’s purchase of more than 4 million acres of land in 1881. Many new communities and towns were springing up in what is today called Central Florida, and citrus farming was on the minds of many settlers as a way to fortune and a gentleman’s life. In the 1880s, the Orlando area and its many communities and lakes were referred to as “South Florida.” What is called South Florida today was a vast unsettled swamp with no more than a few hundred settlers in the Everglades region.

  From a research standpoint, it was a daunting task to have to search through every town and county in Central Florida to see if the Deweys once owned land there. The only clue in Bruno as to the name of a place was Birdie calling a town “Lemonville.” There is no town named Lemonville in Florida today, and a search of old maps failed to turn up any towns that were ever called Lemonville. There was, however, once a town called “Mellonville,” which is now a part of Sanford, Florida, named after Captain Charles Mellon, a war casualty of the Second Seminole War. Sanford was another dream community of a large landowner, in this case Henry Shelton Sanford, a United States diplomat, who purchased more than 12,500 acres of land to start his “Gate City of South Florida,” a citrus empire and transportation hub to the emerging areas surrounding what would become the town of Sanford.

  The other clue as to their settlement point was that in Bruno, Birdie stated that she had a “relative” living in the area who recommended that they look at land in Central Florida, where he was living. Tracking down the name of the “relative” was another puzzle to be solved; he is never mentioned by name in Bruno. It was not known if the relative was just a fictional character added to make the story more interesting.

  The answer to both questions emerged after months of research and quite unexpectedly. Searching through book stacks in the Florida Collection at the West Palm Beach Library, a volume entitled Orange County by William Fremont Blackman was found. Written in 1927, the book provided Orange County and Orlando’s history and biographical information on influential citizens. Blackman related the history of several towns, including a small settlement called Zellwood, which Colonel T. Elwood Zell founded in 1876. Zell was a retired Civil War officer and a publisher of a well-known encyclopedia of the time, Zell’s Cyclopedia. Richard Goldsborough Robinson was Zellwood’s co-founder. That name did not mean much, until the book revealed his heritage: Robinson was Zachary Taylor’s grandnephew. And thus Birdie’s “relation” was revealed—Robinson and Birdie were first cousins. Mary Louise Taylor, Robinson’s mother, was Eliza Taylor Spilman’s sister.

  R.G. ROBINSON. Birdie Dewey’s cousin and Zellwood’s co-founder, Richard Goldsborough Robinson, a grandnephew of Zachary Taylor, encouraged Fred and Birdie Dewey to purchase farmland in the Orange County settlement of Zellwood. Courtesy Florida Archives.

  Zellwood is about thirty miles from Sanford, so was Zellwood the mythical Lemonville of Birdie’s writings? That question remained. Tracing the route to Zellwood explained in the book Bruno, the Deweys left St. Augustine and took the train to Tocoi, where they could catch a steamer to the lake region around Orlando. From Tocoi, the Deweys sailed up the St. Johns River in a steamer and spent a few nights in Eustis as they waited for the message to be delivered to Robinson that they had arrived.

  The ride from Eustis to Zellwood was described by Birdie as a “half day journey” by wagon. The roads at that time were dusty, rutted dirt roads at best, so travel was slow. Soon they were in Zellwood, “the little inland settlement surrounding two small lakes for which we had started.” The lakes Birdie mentions are Lake Maggiore and Lake Minore, just north of Zellwood.

  Her writings reveal why she probably did not name her cousin in Bruno: “It had been long years since we had seen the relative who was living there, and childish memories did not tell us that he was the most visionary and unpractical of men…we took his word for a number of wild statements and decided to buy and settle there.” Orange County’s land transaction records revealed that on February 1, 1882, the Deweys purchased ten acres of land for $100 from Charles Sellmer, with R.G. Robinson as witness. And thus, the Deweys had their first Florida homestead.

  ZELLWOOD PAMPHLET. Colonel T. Ellwood Zell founded Zellwood, Florida, in 1876. Zellwood served as home for the Deweys in 1882 and early 1883. Courtesy www.archive.org.

  CENTRAL FLORIDA LOG CABIN. After purchasing ten acres, the Deweys initially lived in a log cabin in Zellwood. Birdie called it “pioneering with a vengeance.” She furnished the shanty with books, pictures, bedding and clothing. Courtesy Florida Archives.

  As Fred was building their house in Zellwood, they stayed in a log cabin, what Birdie called “pioneering with a vengeance.” She describes it thusly: “This shanty looke
d decidedly uninviting, but the alternative was a room in the house of our relative, a full mile away from our place; so we decided in favor of the shanty. It was built of rived boards, slabs split out of the native logs. It had one door and no windows. In fact, it needed none; for the boards lapped roughly on each other, leaving cracks like those in window-blinds, so we could put our fingers through the walls almost anywhere.”

  The tiny cabin had basic furnishings, but the Deweys’ possessions soon arrived from Jacksonville: her beloved books, a few pictures, their bedding and their clothing. She wrote, “We had two wooden chairs, and a bench which we put to various uses. When these things were all in place, and our books arranged on boards which were laid across the rafters overhead, we felt as snug as was Robinson Crusoe in his cave.”

  An adjoining ten acres of land was purchased by Birdie’s sister, Clara, and her husband, George Andrews, in September 1882. It is not believed that the Andrewses intended to relocate to Zellwood, but rather that they bought the land as an investment, or perhaps as a loan to Fred and Birdie, with the Andrewses holding the deed. In December 1882, the Deweys purchased the land from the Andrewses, so that they now had twenty acres in Zellwood, more than enough acreage for a substantial orange grove.

  ILLUSTRATION FROM THE BOOK BRUNO. Byrd Spilman Dewey’s 1899 book Bruno, published by Little, Brown and Company, became a bestseller. The story, about the Dewey’s dog, chronicled the young family’s 1880s Florida life and adventures. Private collection.

  With hired help, the Deweys cleared pine trees and stumps so that the orange grove dream could begin. Their plan was to raise vegetables on part of the land to provide an immediate income while the orange trees matured. The Deweys sold part of the land as a right-of-way for the train route southward from Eustis. That train route was parallel to the present-day road, the Orange Blossom Trail.