<center>The Way It Was, 1981</center>

1981

William Eugene "Gene" Barber, Artist, Instructor, Historian & Genealogist authored a series of articles for the Baker County Press entitled "The Way It Was".

His articles covered all aspects of Baker County pioneers lives in a colorful, entertaining, as well as, educational manner. At an early age, Gene possessed the desire and ability to interview the 'Old Folks'. He was as talented in the use of the pen, as he is with a brush, choosing his words and expressions in a way to paint an exciting and interesting story.

Ghosts of Christmas Past, not-so-long-past, to-come Conclusion

Some comments on the past year

Reminiscing with Paul Taylor

The Militia of 1837

A Cracker Lexicon - Two Parts

John & Mollie Crews

When bombs rained on Baker County

Names and views from behind those framed photographs - Two Parts

Catholicism in Baker County - Three Parts

Children of the Confederacy

The Glen Centennial - Part one

The Glen Centennial - Part two

The rape of the Osceola Forest

The Glen Centennial - Charly W. Turner

The Glen Centennial - 'The second Yankee invasion'

The Glen Centennial - More faces from the past.....

History of the arts here

The Glen Centennial - A photo story

Glen in the 1880's

The Glen Centennial - Conclusion

A Baker County map of 1840

Francis Marion Brown

Cracker Manifesto

Reminiscing at the Beaches

Columns draw readers' ire

Post offices in Glen St. Mary

The demise of the front porch

The demise of the front porch - conclusion

The Okefenokee Swamp - Part one

The Okefenokee Swamp -Part Two

The Okefenokee - Part Three

The Okefenokee

No article this week [Sep 10, 1981]

Rufus Powers grew up with Glen

In the spirit of the Centennial

The Glen Centennial - Appraisal and appreciation

The Okefenokee Swamp - A resumption of the series

People of the Okefenokee - The Indians

The Okefenokee - The whites move in....and out

The Okefenokee - Assorted legends, haints and boogers

It's time to mobilize - Against strip-mining in the Osceola

The turn of the Century

Data from some old maps

Thanksgiving feasts of old

Looking ahead at Olustee

Christmas 1981

To a mellow Christmas

After 'The Day After'

Potpourri of the year 1981

THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday January 1, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Ghosts of Christmas past, not-so-long-past, to-come
Conclusion
For those of you biting your nails in anticipations since our last cliff-hanger, here is the exciting conclusion:
"Well, Ghost of Christmas Perhaps to Come, your name doesn't strike a cheery note of optimism, but let's get it over with. Where to this time?"
"See for yourself," the little fellow chirped as he flew up and down and sometimes faded from view.
I supposed our destination to have been the city because there was not a patch of nature's green in sight. We were in the shadow of a tall apartment complex, and sharing the shadow with us was a sprawling mobile home community. Beyond the house trailers was a poorly kept garbage landfill. A nearby convenience store advertised "Labor Day Dope Sold Here" and "Christmas Fun Candy."
Christmas Perhaps to Come advised me, "Even in your day, they were pushing Christmas earlier and earlier. This store, for instance, just pulled down its Fourth of July bunting."
Small groups of zombie-like kids drifted or stood about the asphalted lot carrying signs proclaiming, "Vote Sybarite-the Party for a Year-Round High."
Little Perhaps advised, "A coalition of your old Redneck types and burned-out Hippies. The Sybarites' initial image was that of a haven for free-thinking voters of the adolescent age. They also appealed to disillusioned liberals and conservatives, both fearful of the radical directions their parties were taking."
"Christmas," he added, "a six month celebration-vacation is among their strongest platform promises. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
"No," I snapped. "Where are all the Democrats and Republicans? And the Independents? And also, where's the grass...er, the vegetation?"
"Oh, it's terribly gauche to be Democrat or Republican these days, and nobody, but nobody, dares to be independent."
I mopped my brow from the summer heat, almost longing for my cold attic room.
"Who's responsible for this strange party? Who's pulling the strings from the bottom? The Commies? Big Business? Some.....?"
"Nobody," answered Perhaps as he pirouetted in the air (very disconcerting to one in need of answers). "It just happened. Started around the social circles of Washington and the wine and pot parties of the Redneck chic. As usual, the image makers in advertising grabbed it and sold it to business, which used it to sell automobiles, booze, and the latest fad gadgets. Blacks, the poor (so-called and in fact) and others were exploited shamelessly. It was a rallying cry among misunderstood youth and tired, irresponsible parents alike."
"Surely," I offered, "there are some left from the old days who would rebel against this wasting of the mind by such blatant appeals to the bodily senses?"
"Probably not," answered Perhaps. "Even in your day, the majority of the public about you was hooked on dope of some sort--alcohol every day as a matter of course, a joint or two to get into a party spirit, and most people your age and above were popping aspirin and prescription pain killers and tranquilizers. Why should there be any left from your day to protest? They are part of it."
"First of all, I'd prefer you to not ring out on that 'from my day' bit so much," I declared between clenched teeth. "And what is that stump over there?"
"Never mind. Here's an historical marker. It's badly defaced, but it says something about being erected to mark the site of the last tree in the former political unit of Baker County, Florida."
Walking around the big remains of the water oak, I spied a piece of terra cotta pipe partly enveloped by the bark, just like the big water oak that once stood in my yard. There was a corner of a pink brick protruding from between embracing roots, just like the one in my yard.
"Perhaps, Old Boy, this is, or was, my tree, isn't it?"
"Does it make you sad?" he asked while still cavorting in the air.
I had to mull it all over in my mind for a while. "No. No,. I reckon not. I cannot and would not hold to the past or alter the future, but if you'll get me back to 1980 and my 73 pounds of cats, I'll do what I can about properly using and living every precious moment I'll know I am possessing. I'll share my limited abilities and perform in deed rather than words only. I'll......."
"And let mankind be free to take its own course, good or bad, right?" interrupted Perhaps.
"Right." in taking one last visual sweep of the trashy asphalt and dingy concrete world that once had been lovely Turkey Creek, I saw a spindly-limbed kid propped against the convenience store. He labored with a stubby pencil trying to graphically reproduce a tree from the clues offered by the giant stump.
Seems like, on that reassuring note, we should have exited to the stirring 'Hallelujah Chorus,' but, instead, a radio somewhere pumped out something about 'I spent Christmas with Jeremiah the Toadfrog, and we got hopped up together, ey, ey, ey,..."
The remainder of the story is both superfluous and anticlimactic; I waked, threw open the window and called to a passing lad to tell me what day it was, sent a fine goose over to the Cratchet's, etc.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, January 8, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Some comments on the past year

Over a holiday coffee table this writer was asked if he had an opinion on 1980 (Imagine anybody thinking this column would have an opinion about anything!). We pondered a bit, and with a minimum of circumlocution, here are our thoughts on some events ot the past year.
The holding of 52 Americans by a country controlled by adolescent-minded religious fanatics for well over a year is exceedingly embarrassing. After dallying around for so long, anything we do now, foolish or laudable, will be wrong, but the changes of administration and political philosophy in Washington has presented us with one more opportunity to act.
Earthquakes in Italy and Algeria: beyond the charges and accusations regarding the lack of warnings and the relief scandals following those tragedies comes the very sobering realization that nature doesn't care when, who, and how hard she strikes, and she couldn't care less about mankind's puny greed and politics.
This column saw the Olympic boycott as a just but weak protest against the bullying tactics of the USSR, Since our nation refuses to cut all critical aid to Russia, staying away from games is a bit silly by itself. This column would have liked to have personally popped the jaws of the athletes whose whines about missing their big opportunity drowned out the shrieks of the Afghan victims.
The Polish Workers strike: maybe the old Soviet Bloc isn't as invincible as we once fearfully believed.. Remember, with very few exceptions, every little nation jumped on by the Russian Bear has whipped the tar out of her.
Why were so few of us surprised that the Freedom Flotilla was full of Fidel's culls and outcasts? And we cannot understand why we welcomed Fidel's shipments but clapped our hands over the Statue of Liberty inscription when persecuted Haitians tried to come ashore.
This column would unhesitatingly vote the eruption of Mt. St. Helens as the nation's number one story of '80. Murders, riots, and inflatlon we can have anytime, but a real live continental U.S. volcano kicking up a fuss is not your everyday, run-of-the-mill happening. We would almost vote the Saturn fly-by as number two.
The election campaigns from local to national levels once again demonstrated the American propensity toward bad taste borne out of desperation and greed. We frankly believe that had the attacks been less personal a number of races would have had very different results. Although many of us experience a vicarious thrill when we hear "naming names" and muck-raking, we can be very uncomfortable watching soiled linens being laundered in public.
This column feels that one of the truly big events of the local 1980 campaign was not the sheriff's race, but was the historic first broadcast of the county's final rally and of the on-the-spot election returns.
Beginning after Christmas of 1979 and lasting intermittently into 1980, Florida earth tremors made the news but a few times, but to this writer, anytime the earth moves it is of prime importance. We first experienced the local tremors when our kitchen door steadily rattled and ripples formed on our fish pond on a breezeless day. The experts seemed to be at a loss to explain, but to one who became aware of earth tremors while walking to school in Alaska, this writer can flat-out state that the earth shook, ever so gently, but it shook in 1980.
Two of the most positive events in this column's way of thinking was the forming of a local Chamber of Commerce and the opening of the first County Fair. Both can do more to re-establish county-community pride and spirit than any other dozen events together.
We'd like to forget the big Blizzard of March, '80.
The Chrysler bail-out was generous, nice, and set a stupid precedent. "Uncle Sam, my art classes aren't doing very well.... How about a handout?"
We never viewed President Kennedy's death as anything but sad and tragic, but we're tired of hearing about it. Let us hope the newsmakers find enough to report on (hopefully good) in '81 that they won't have to resort to this ghoulish business again in our lifetimes.
1980 saw an unprecedented number of redneck gentlemen sporting permanents. First they cussed the Hippies and then borrowed their long hair and beards. Then they cussed the Blacks and borrowed their music. Now they've cussed the swingers and borrowed their hair. Where will all this redneck chic end?
We noted the passing of the CB fad in 1980 and wonder why all those folks who "had to have one because of the danger of being stalled on a lonely stretch of road at night" don't figure they'll be in that same adverse situation now. This column believes it knew the reason for the moving forests of tall vehicle-antennas all along; a lot of middle-aged ladies received a thrill hearing dirty-talking truckers pass by.
If '81 isn't much better, we think we'll sleep through it.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, January 15, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Reminiscing with Paul Taylor
This columnist has always enjyed talking with people who have been around for a while and who have combined ther longevity with a sense and apprecition of history. Some time ago we spent a pleasant afternoon over a glass of Wilma Morris' lemonade with Paul Taylor (a great-grandson of the pioneer Gordon Stewart Taylor), and we wish to share that experience with our readers.
We talked about his famed ancestor Gordon Stewart and this columnist learned, in addition to the already-known fact that the elder Taylor was the major light in bringing Methodism to the north half of the county, that he was a minister in North Carolina long before the Civil War and his marriage. Although the Reverend Taylor was not ordained, he founded the present church at Taylor on his plantation in 1880 or '81. The original building he constructed was purchased, according to Mr. Paul Taylor, by Lacy Combs for about $100.
Gordon Stewart's son Thomas P. was a merchant and the father of several children, among whom was William Barney. Barney was the father of our subject Paul.
Barney was hired by the Gum Swamp Turpentine Company (the Downing Company) as manager when the company's representatives (from Brunswick) learned he had some education. He replaced a man named Sweat who moved back to Georgia. Barney picked up the weekly payroll in Lake City and took a black man along to ride shotgun on the long horse and buggy trip.
Barney moved to Jacksonville after the turpentine began to play out and worked on the street cars for a number of years. He later returned to Baker County and settled in McClenny. After serving as tax collector and as a county commissioner, he relocated in Raiford and died there.
Among Paul Taylor's many recollections of the Taylor Community were the Taylor Masonic Lodge being above a store and his joining the Taylor Church in 1924.
In 1920, 22 year old Paul Taylor was selected to serve with a Mr. Rowe (he didn't recall the first name during our conversation) and Mrs. Alberta Rye as a census taker. His area was Olustee, Sanderson, and McClenny. Starting on the outer edge of McClenny, he worked through to make a careful count.
He recalls there were six or seven stores, and all were kept abreast of the times by the Baker County Standard. Nobody had electricity. Aunt Jane Herndon ran a boarding house by the courthouse (these will be noted in 1981 as the bright yellow house and library, respectively, on South Fifth Street). The Powers Hotel served great meals for .25. And Richard Davis was among the first, if not the first, to have a telephone inside the town of McClenny.
Mr. Taylor was also a rural mail carrier in 1920, serving a few months in the then populous Sapp district. He was moved a few miles north to Manning, site of the busy and extensive Goethe Lumber Company.
Mr. Sharp was the commissary manager for the Goethe Manning operations. Mr. Sharp will be remembered by many as the long-time owner of the little Pure Oil Station on the northwest corner of McClenny Avenue and Sixth Street. He was recommended to fill the position of Manning postmaster, but when Goethe moved to Glen Saint Mary, Mr. Sharp left with them. His nephew Bill Overstreet took over as postmaster but soon moved to Glen to temporarily fill the same position there for a short while.
In a re-shuffling of the rural mail routes in the mid-twenties, some of the Glen patrons were placed under the Sanderson post office service, and Green's Creek was included with the Glen route. Paul Taylor's new route ran from north of Sanderson to Baxter, beginning about 1923 and lasting until 1934.
It was while on this route that the young Mr. Taylor felt the call to preach, and he pastored his first church (Cypress Grove) at Possum Trot. He built his first home in McClenny in 1924 (the Dink and Sadie Mae Powers Home on West McClenny Avenue), and he bought his first car ($700.00).
Mr. Taylor won over Grady Milton for McClenny's town clerk in 1927. He received $1.00 to $1.50 per meeting for his work. He was already getting a whopping $120.00 per month for his 20 mile mail carrier route.
As McClenny's clerk he was asked by the town and county commissions to accompany Johnny Dugger and a Mr. Crampton to Baldwin to strongly urge Florida Power and Light to extend service to McClenny. When the westward reaching lines finally entered McClenny, Paul Taylor's house was among the first to enjoy the benefits of electricity.
Paul Taylor has spent much time gathering historical information on his family and several years ago pubilshed a booklet about the Taylor generations of the past.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, January 22, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
The Militia of 1837
Columbia County, of which Baker County was a part until 1858, girded itself in early 1836 for battle with the Seminoles and their allies during the Second Seminole War. Since most of that County's earliest records have been lost, muster rolls of militia men such as this one have to be discovered in the hands of private collectors and descendants of some of the men who foresaw the value of documents of their times.
This particular list is owned by Eldridge Collins of Columbia County, and because of the goose quill writing, some of it is open to interpretation. We present the list with our own edition and added notes.
William Cason, William Ammons, Charles Branch (lived not far from the northern line between present Baker and Columbia Counties), Fisher Ghaskins (Gaskins; lived for a while in the present Union County area), James Goodbread, Allen Hazell (or Hazen), indecipherable, Cornelius Barber (later moved to Putnam County), Thomas Gaskins, Jacob Holbrook, William Barber (listed on the Saint Mary's River at Trail Ridge.
William T. Holbrook (all the Holbrook entries were spelled "Holbrooks"), John Cason, Ransom Cason, R.B. Buffam (?), Jesse A. Thomas, - Joiner, Cader Hancock (lived on the present Baker-Union line near Lulu), Giles W. Ellis (there is a story among his descendants that he fired the first shot of the war in Columbia County), David Gillet, Daniel Cason, John B. Casan, Samuel Joiner, Joseph Joiner, John Moody, E.M. Moody.
I.J. (?) Carter, Elisha Carter (lived for a long time in the present Union County before moving to near Long Branch in northwest Clay County), Dennis Cason, Green (?) B. Cason, - Cason, Cader Hancock, Littleton Hancock (lived in the present Union County and then moved into Lake City), John Gaines, Uriah Joiner, James Hancock, John H. Joiner (?), James Munden, Thomas M. Moody, John Matthews.
Enock Moody, Henry Moore (also a resident of the present Union County), James Munden, William Munden, Nathaniel Moody, John B. Moody, W.T. Tucker, William A. Tucker, Lewis M. Tucker (all three Tuckers later moved to the Clay-east Bradford section), and Isiah Thomas.
Some might wonder why so few Baker County men if we were a part of Columbia at that time. Among several reasons for the lack of east Columbia residents on the roll are (1) there were very few people living there to offer men for the militia and (2) it was more convenient and efficient for most of the men to join militia units in Camden County (present Charlton), Georgia, and the neighboring counties of Duval and Nassau.

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THE BAKER C0UNTY PRESS, Thursday, January 29, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
A Cracker Lexicon
Most of us Southerners (both by birth and adoption) have chuckled over the restaurant placemats featuring an illustrated bit of fun titled "How to Talk Southern." And we native-borns have chafed under the agony of hearing a Bronx-reared fill-in for Johnny Carson regale a howling audience with in invidious monologue full of quaint words and pronunciations he picked up and exaggerated during his recent trip south. Worse yet is the torture of hearing Liz Taylor crucifying some writer's idea of a "Southun acceunt."
Truth is, there is no Southern accent common to all born below the Mason-Dixon. Maybe we should go a bit further in our qualifications and say that there was no one manner of speaking before the homogenization of all dialects by the destructive power of TV (its commercials teach your kids the heinous pronunciation of "p' nits" instead of "peanuts" while encouraging them to talk sassily with their nasty little unwiped mouths full.
In days of yore, Tidewater Virginia folk would be at a loss to understand a visitor from Chattanooga; a North Carolina hillbilly would discover his verbal communications failing when he tried to talk with a 'Geechee people; and all but a few mountaineers might just look at a verbalizing Cracker and say, "Huh?"
We won't go into the background of the Cracker speech now since we pretty well exhausted that subject a few years back in a series entitled "The Crackers," but we, as a pubilc service, figured we should do our bit in "learning Yankees how to talk proper 'Merican" by offering a sampler from our Cracker Lexicon. We trust they will find it "ratsmart an' a mawt holpful."
For a starter, there is "logging." Now, you might think this has to do with bringing those big firs down from the western mountains, but actually it is a verb meaning to move along smoothly and easliy: "Now you loggin', Man."
POND SCOGGIN (pawn' scawgin), n. It Is embarassing how many parents have neglected their children's education by not telling them that what other unbright people call egrets and herons are in reality pond scoggins: "'At air pond scoggin done et muh fish."
HANNEL (hen' el), 1. n. a part of a thing which is grasped by the han' in using or moving it: "I gone knock you on your haid one wit a ax hannel." 2. v. to touch or feel with the han': "Down you hannel me, Boy." 3. as a Plural with long, an item of undergarment that comes in mighty handy this winter.
HOLE, v. to borrow: "Le' me hole yore pen."
HOLT, n. to grasp or cradle in the hand: "I tuk a holt uh duh hannel."
HILT, v. "I hilt it til 'e tuk uh holt." (we're certain you're beginning to catch on. Soon you'll be speaking intelligently and enunciating in clarion tones too).
KILT, v. to take a life or to conclude: "He kilt the laist uh duh bottle, so I kilt him."
PYEAR, n. a walkway over water: "To duh boat t' duh pyear, Uncle Coley."
PYEARS, 1. two or more of the above. 2. seemingly, apparent. 3. a nice family living north of Glen.
STOB, n. a piece of wood intended to be driven into the ground. v. to pierce with a sharp instrument: "Come one step nyearer an' I'll stob you wf' thisyear pitch fork."
NYEARER; adj. moving on in.
OUTEN (out' in), v. 1. to extinguish: "Outen 'at air fahr." 2. to exit or to emanate: "He come outen them woods lak a house a' fahr."
TOAD STRANGLER, n. a heavy rain.
YOUNG NOEY, n. a heavier rain.
KYOUNTER (keyown' ter), n. a long high table: "Chunk duh kyorn on duh kyounter."
KYORN (keyowrn), n. the widely cultivated cereal plant Zea Mays.
SHECKS, n. the husks of kyorn.
TAHR, v. to become weary: "Work'll shore tahr me out."
HEUNH, adv. to or toward this place: "Heunh, Rattler, heunh, heunh.
YANDER, adv. at that site: "Fotch It f'm over yander."
FOTCH, v. to retrieve.
YELK, n. the yellow of an egg: "Hit 'uz a double yelk aig I jest broke."
PYERT, adj. lively in good health "Rat pyert, thank'e an hah you?"
Of course, without the grunts and the nasal and umlaut sounds inherited from our Indo-European ancestors and the slurring handed down by our Celtic forebears, there can still be no proper pronunciation of Crackerese. For instance, to correctly say "heunh," you must situate yourself near a long-dead horse and then quickly expel the malodorous air from your nasal passage and mouth at as nearly the same time as possible.
Keep practicing, and we shall provide you with a fresh list of choice cracker words in our next effusion.

THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, February 5, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
More of our Cracker lexicon
SURP, n. a reddish, dark, clear viscous fluid produced from cooking the juice of sugar cane and is used at every meal on biscuits, fried side meat, grits, and leftover peas.
FOUT (rhymes with "out"), v. the past tense of a violent physical encounter between two or more persons: "Them boys fout all over the juke joint."
JUKE (jook, rhymes with "took"), 1. n. a place of entertainment and spiritous refreshments but dubious reputation. 2. v. to go in search of a lively good time.
SCOOTERPOOP, v. to go in search of an even livelier good time: "Ahtm a' goin scooterpoopin tonight!"
MOUT (rhymes with "out"), v. a form of may: "They mout come over, an they mout not."
CWILE' v. to wind into rings: "At air spredinatter is a gone cwile up iff'n you keep on a messin witheem."
SPREDINATTER (spred' in at r), n. a harmless American snake of the genus Heterodon.
AITER, prep. later in time: "Ah'll be thare aiter a whawl."
MIDDLIN, n. the fatty sides and belly of a hog: "Ain't nothin seasons limer beans better'n smoke middlin."
LAG, n. one of limbs which support and move the body: "Ah got a crank in muh lag."
CRANK, n. a muscular spasm.
NUZZLE, v. to snuggle or cuddle with amorous intent.
NARY (nerry), adv. adj. a word used in a negative sense: "Ain't nary a one of y'all got 'ny sense." "Ah ain't got nary."
NUHCE, v. to tenderly care for: "Ah ain't tuck you t' nuhcel!"
PINT, v. to indicate, usually with a finger: "Don't pint yore fanger at me."
THOE, v. to chunk: "Thoe me duh ball, Leroy"
CHUNK, v. a word borrowed from the Creek Indians ball game Chunka and meaning to thoe.
GAICE, n. a fuel derived from petroleum: "If the price a' gaice keeps on a'gettin higher, Ah ain't gone be able to keep on a'runnin muh 4X4 up an down Main no eighteen hours a day."
ONT. (this one is tricky; although possessed of only one syllable it must be pronounced in two levels, starting lower, ending higher: about 7, in a word that evolved from the contraction I want: "Ont a drank a' warter."
AHRN, v. to press clothes with a hot ahrn. n. a metal: "You wouldn't unnerstand nothin if yore haid wuz softened up with a railroad ahrn."
GOPHER, n. a terrestial turtle.
SALLYMANDER, n. a burrowing rodent.
ORTER, n. an aquatic, fur-bearing animal of the genus Lutra.
SHET, v. 1. to close. 2. to get rid of: "Ah'm a' gone git shet of you rat quick like."
MINNER, n. any small fresh-water fish.
LIKE, v. to be deficient or short of: "Ah like two havin enough." An afore our typographer gits t' likin the patience to do 'ny more a' this stuff, we better wrop it up and git shet uv it.
And as some of our readers are guffawing over what those ignorant rednecks have done to the English language, we wish to advise them that in reality they have done very little to it. Crackerese is among the least changed American dialects and is quite close to some of the original English language strains brought over three hundred years ago.
We could also give our Northern friends and urban neighbors equal time and offer some of their pronunciations such as dag or dwog for dog, schowool for school, and yeunhhh for yes.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, February 12, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
John and Molly
A Valentine Story

John was born John Calvin Crews. He came into the world, the Georgia Bend to be more exact, in 1880. Molly was Mary Ellen Chesser, born in 1871 in the edge of the Great Okefenokee Swamp. John was big, handsome, and from middle age on possessed of gleaming white hair. Molly was short, lean, big-boned, wrinkled as a prune since thirty, and never had one grey-hair in her 91 years.

When they married, folks all over Baker County, the Bend, and west Nassau wondered, "Why did John Crews want that old ugly woman?"

But they who questioned never understood things like love, patience, devotion, acceptance, and understanding. "John is my man," said Molly, "and keep yore damned hands off'n'Im."

John would sometimes look at his dark little wife who would be making ready for church or trading and comment, "Molly's got that hair screwed up so tight her eyebrows is pulled up to her hairline."

Molly worshipped her John and stated, "My John is purty." John would say, "Molly's got to pull them wrinkles apart 'fore she can powder 'em."
And they would spend hours together on the front porch over the newspaper and books while John taught his Molly how to read. Little by little he guided her through the fundamentals of writing.

All was not always humorous and pleasant. The seemingly mismatched couple had their difficulties, usually over John's drinking and Molly's stubborn streak. John enjoyed his liquor and often pitched a good one in his youth. Molly took to the fields and worked, secure in the knowledge that John would come home. Sometimes Molly would get the mulligrubs and stay on a silence binge for days, but John would go to and from work every day knowing his Molly would have supper waiting for him when he returned. In a few days he would kid her out of her bad mood.

Molly never knew how to cook for less than a log rolling. She experimented making pies out of yellow squash and had parched corn and acorns for coffe substitutes when times were hard. She used hog lard in her cakes and asked her company to "have some more of this ol' bread." She raised Poland-China hogs bigger than herself and could wrestle them to the ground if necessary.

John was an artisan who could fashion anything out of almost nothing. He created keepsake boxes which were beautiful and elegant in their simpilcity and scant touches of decoration. He made fascinating hooks and pegs from satiny finished tree limbs. His eyes were blue and the expression "twinkle in the eyes" had to be inspired by him.

John was reared In Nassau County and near Burton Ford on the Saint Mary's River. He attended Crews School near Bay Branch and received a surprisingly good education for nineteenth century Florida. His letters were painstakingly perfected and his converstions could be most formal.

Molly had spent a total of three hours in the Barber Bay School in 1878 (and that begrudgingly). She might have been persuaded, by her Pa to have remained longer but barefoot and natural Molly refused to wear shoes in class. Her teacher, "Ol' Man Stokes," insisted she be shod while in his school or punished.

"You try it, you ol' son (etc.)," she hollered. When Prfessor Stokes grabbed her arm for her switching, Molly soundly slapped him and ran out the door for home. Molly cleared thme walk-plank over the ever-standing pool of water at the front door and when Professor Stokes hit the plank, she flipped him into the mud.

Professor Stokes insisted that Mr. Chesser whip Molly, and Mr. Chesser agreed that her sass and the dunking called for punishment. "But," he advised the teacher, "I can't believe the wearing of shoes has that much to do with how well the head learns. Molly was wrong in what she did to you, and you were wrong in wanting to whip her about not wearing shoes. I figure It's even."

"Pa never made me go to school again, and he let me go to the fields and do the plowing," Molly remembered almost three quarters of a century later. "And I didn't wear shoes again till I wanted to. And when I set my cap fer John Crews, I wanted to."

When John and Molly's first child was born, they were living at Mattox Crossing between McClenny and Baldwin. It was a violent little community full of rough customers, and few were surprised when one of the Mattox boys shot and killed one of the Barber boys.

Molly, abed convalescing from the birth of her baby, turned her gaze out the window in time to be a witness to the shooting. The Fernandina-held trial necessitated a near sixty mile trip for Molly and her infant in a bed prepared for them by John in a wagon. There were no accommodations aboard the train for a bedridden new mother and infant.

Molly gave her witness in the Nassau County courthouse and returned home. The baby died soon after.

John and Molly laid the child's body to rest in Manntown Cemetery and soon were blessed with Jesse. This new child was the light of their life. One day Jesse was killed, believed to have been murdered and his body tossed onto a railroad to be crushed by a locomotive.

Molly picked up her son's brains and placed them in his lunch pail. She covered them with Jesse's straw work hat, took John's hand, and they went home. Molly and her John were made of sturdy stuff, and they continued...alone together...and in love.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, February 19, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
When bombs rained on Baker County
Your writer is an inveterate walker. He walked as a child because there was usually no other way to go. He walked in his youth for entertainment. Now he walks just to keep the old blood pumping. He believes walking cures or prevents just about anything (severed limbs, acute appendicitis, and bubonic plague are among the major problems excepted).
But we digress. Several mornings ago, faithful hound at leash, your writer struck out across the woods south of the old Atlantic Coast Line for his daily walk (actually, the faithful hound, as a rule, drags your writer through the briars and wiregrass rather than being led, but we digress again). We spied a surprising clearing within a swampy area ringed with bare grey trees and spangled with white pond birds.
Always on the lookout for unusual topographic features in our area, we investigated. At roughly the four points of the compass, drainage ditches ran outward from the heavily wooded site. Inside the perimeter of briars and cypresses we discovered a circular grassy area spotted with a few myrtles and willows. Although evidently eroded, the spot was recognized as being arranged in concentric circles. Cropping out from the carpet grass were patches of oyster shell.
The romantic imagination of your writer wanted to shout, Ancient Timucuan sacrificial grounds," and all the while the realistic side of the brain said, "Sawmill site." The difficult and lengthy transportation of oyster shell pretty well precluded both, and the swampiness certainly eliminated a sawmill site.
After much pondering on the subject we did what we should have done in the first place. The writer's father answered, "The old naval bombing range target."
Of course, your writer should have concluded that from the evidence he had been walking over for the past several months. Memories began to edge in, the flood, of the family skirting the fenced area while on a cattle drive from Fiftone toward home. Memories of diving planes, loud pops, puffs of white smoke, and little thought of the danger we had placed ourselves or stock in (even without exploding, those little iron bombs falling from such a height could have made nasty holes in a hapless horse and rider).
There were recollections of privies and stray cows being bombed miles from the target. We recalled gray rescue team vehicles stopping at our house asking if we had seen a plane go down and, "which way is Maxville?"
We remembered our morbid curiosity taking us to huge craters in the woods and searching among twisted scraps of metal and Mother shaking her head and saying, "Them pore boys. Some Mother is grieving somewhere."
There were intricate little gadgets made of wondrously light metal that were later turned into robots and space probing rockets by your writer. There were soft helmets which were quickly dropped when someone mentioned that an ear had been found in such things out here.
Also remembered was the airport a few miles away south of McClenny on the Raiford Road. In those days we didn't worry about poor TV reception from the planes because (1) we hoped that the noise was somehow keeping "them people from over yonder away from our shores," and (2) there wasn't any TV (can you possibly imagine a world being deprived of Mork and Mindy and Three's Company?)
Thirty-six years later your writer could not bring himself to stand in the middle of the target. Sitting on its edge he began to muse, and he decided that there wasn't very much difference in a sacrificial site and a bombing target. Both were methodical, planned, condoned by their societies, and helped to satisfy mankind's inherent thirst for blood.
Man has always killed and made excuses for it. He has labeled his wars "holy," said his blood sacrifices were to appease a supreme being, and he currently claims thrill murderers are only giving vent to the anger and frustrations born of the deprivations of their youth and backgrounds.
During our reflections another type of killing came to mind - the death penalty. Very much in the news today, it has its vociferous proponents declaring that its reinstitution would be a major deterrent to murder. More vocal are its opponents who claim research proves that it cannot make a bit of difference.
Your writer has mixed emotions on the subject and has no magical way of knowing the efficacy of the death penalty in preventing murder among the widespread pubilc, but he does know it is a definite deterrent on two people - the fellow in the chair and your writer.
Such are the strange thoughts of one sitting on a target for dive bombers.
And, by the way, you really ought to try walking.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, February 28,1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Names and views from behind those framed photographs
Part One
For as long as your writer can remember, there was a framed photographic family tree hanging in the master bedroom of the old family house. When he came into possession of the Victorian heirloom he was sorely tempted to take it apart and peruse the newspapers he knew from many years of taking old photographs from their frames must be there.
But the old piece was held in high esteem and even a bit of reverence by the family and your columnist, and therefore the deed was not done. A little over two years ago the family tree was ignominiously shattered by a group of vandalising punk kids and we had our opportunity to see what lay behind.
Besides a sheet of tissue paper there were three newspapers - The Soldier, printed in Columbia, South Carolina, on the 15th of January, 1893, and "...issued in the interest of the Christian Sabbath, and of Temperance and other Reforms"; a Jacksonville Times-Union of 29 June, 1937; and a Macclenny Sentinel from the 11th of July, 1894.
The gist of The Soldier was that there would be much fewer drunkards if there were fewer "wicked" people selling the poisonous brews, wines, and spirits and that the majority of those who made and sold the stuff were foreigners. The Soldier claimed that alcoholic manufacturing and consumption were definitely not American institutions.
The T-U carried a couple of big stories on the Spanish Civil War and reported expressed fears of Soviet intervention. Union leaders were claiming a back-to-work movement was a mere "dummy" show. A union organizer's car had been bombed. A pilot named Amelia Earhart was beginning the last lap of her journey across the "hazardous" Pacific ("I'll be in the United States in four days," she grinned as she climbed into her plane.)
There was trouble in the postal system - unwarranted hikes in the rates and an impending Congressional hearing. Gold was in the news with some folks figuring it was going to take an unprecedented rise in value (does some of this seem familiar?) Hitler was applauding Germany's demands for new colonies, and a few right-wingers were warning that we will have to go to war against that fellow one day. Three kidnapped girls were found slain in New Jersey and an ex-convict was being held (not surprisingly, his lawyer said he was planning a temporary insanity defense).
Pepsodent's ad for more sparkling teeth wasn't much less hoopla-ish than some of today's claims that their toothpaste will cure all our social and sexual problems. In 1937 one could conveniently telephone for a cool wave by ordering a General Electric fan (they began at $3.95), and McClenny's GE representative was Y.H. Yarborough. Morrison's Cafeteria offered one egg, two strips of bacon, grits, and ham gravy for 7 cents. For dinner and supper fried chicken with rice and gravy would cost you only 19 cents, and blackberry cobbler with whipped cream was 5 cents. Levy's had swim trunks from $1.65 to $5.00. And a round-trip to Los Angeles from Jacksonville on the L & N RR was $72.00.
The Macclenny Sentinel was owned and edited by James B. Mathews. As were most of the small sheets of its day it was printed on a standard preprinted format which contained more advertisements, political editorials, and literary columns than news of any kind or locality. One could buy 12 issues of the Sentinel for what one Baker County Press costs today. Mr. Matthews said his paper was not only the only paper in the county but was the official paper of the county.
Mr. Matthews was a Populist, as was the majority of Baker County's citizens of northern birth. The Populist Congressional Convention, which would be held in Ocala and to which Baker County was entitled to four delegates, received about four inches of reporting, but the Democratic Convention, to which Baker was entitled to two delegates, received three lines.
J.E. Cole of Glen Saint Mary (he and wife owned a hotel there) was chairman of the state committee.

THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, March 5, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Names and views from behind those framed photographs
Part Two
As were most of the other small newspapers of the day, the 1894 Macclenny Sentinel was mainly an advertiser rather than a disseminator of news. Even some of the news items were ad oriented, and Editor Matthews was not above slipping in a bit of his political philosophy between the social and personal notes.
"The next meeting of the Industrial Legion at the Glen will be held Saturday, July 14, commencing at 7 p.m." and "The People's Party executive committee is called to meet at the courthouse....An invitation is extended to all to meet and make suggestions, for when we say people we mean everybody," were two announcements of interest.
"Mrs. Grace Falana (nee Andress) came Monday from Jacksonville to visit her sisters, Mrs. Linscott and Mrs. Tracy.
"J.R. Herndon, C.C. Corbett, and Fred Johnson went Friday with the sheriff to the Durance place to set aside the widow's dower as petitioned and granted by the probate court.
"Trees in every direction show the lightning's ravages.
"A bold attempt at robbery was attempted a few days ago in the country. A trunk was taken from the house into the field and rifled, but no money was found.
"This month closes a half century of the editor's connection with the printing business, nearly half of which time we have carefully watched and done our best to oppose the poverty grind has gone under the various names of resumption, restoring confidence, etc., but all with one aim, making labor poorer and those lazy, unproductive drones, those leeches, the bondholders, richer. Isn't it time that equal justice to all should give us a fairer legislation? Republican legislation was bad enough, but in one year's time a democratic government has out-Heroded Herod.
"Services at the M.E. church on the second and fourth Sundays of each month, Rev. J.G. Kennelly, pastor.
"We have rains now almost daily.
"Mrs. Elizabeth Duncan, so well known to our citizens from her long residence here, died at her home in South Jacksonville on the morning of July 4. She had been a constant sufferer for over a year, and bore her afflictions with Christian meekness and patience. Her charity and benevolence were her prominent characteristics.
"Olustee Lodge, No. 104, F.A.M. meets the first Saturday night of each month. Visitors are always welcomed."
McElree's Wine of Cardui and Thedford's Black-Draught were for sale at the following Baker County merchants: Z.L. Hubbard, McClenny; Eppinger and Russell, Olustee; T.N. Milton, Olustee; J.C. Norwood and Co., Olustee; F.J. Pons, Sanderson.
"E.E. Pons Attorney at Law, office in city hall, Macclenny, Fla., will attend to all business intrusted to him in Baker County and throughout the state."
Notice was given that Lewis A., Charles J., and William C. Davis had brought suit against Issac Eppinger and John K. Russell and a former partner, of theirs Louis Adler (Eppinger and Adler were residents of New York). F.P. Fleming of Clay County was solicitor for the Complainants, and R.M. Call was Circuit Court Judge.
Sheriff Charles F. Pons advertised a Sheriff's sale of land (except Rowe's and Tanner's) in which the plaintiff was R.H. Snyder and the defendant was the Baker County Banking and Refrigerator Company.
Mr. Z. L. Hubbard passed away, and his wife Mrs. M.C. Hubbard announced that she will continue the ten year old business at Olustee. A notice to debtors and creditors was given William H. Durance, administrator of the estate of the late William H. Durance.
Mrs. Martha C. Clay, nee Vaughn, administratrix of the estate of the late Captain Roger K. Vaughn, late of Glen St. Mary, gave notice that she will apply to county judge Mott Howard for discharge of her duties.
Some of the advertising for cures for men's and women's intimate problems reminded us of the current TV commercials which have received so much flak. There were ads for cures for the drug habit. And there were ads for drugs. Get rich quick schemes, education at home, and all other other enticements we are so accustomed to today were right there in the July 11, 1894, Macclenny Sentinel.
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, March 12, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Catholicism in Baker Country
No evidence of early mission here
It is generally accepted here in Baker County that the Catholic Church began to share the history of the county when ground was broken for Saint Mary's Church only a generation ago. This column does not argue with that belief, because as a viable being within the borders of our county no earlier mission representing the venerable Mother Church is known here.
From our search for a legendary early area mission, which we did not find, we gathered enough material to adduce that, while no Mass was probably celebrated in the county earlier than the establishment of Saint Mary's, the county was not totally void and destitute of some link with Florida's pioneer religion.
Hazarding a hint of dignity to an old tale this writer believes in without foundation, he will devote a few paragraphs to the shadowy Catholic mission "along the Big River or near Macedoney" as mentioned by certain long-past Baker Countians.
First of all, the Church at Rome has not successfully existed for almost two millennia and expanded to universal dimensions by being a sloppy records keeper, and her records do not provide us with an historicity of such a mission.
In 1674 Bishop Calderon of Santiago Cuba (Florida was within that jurisdiction) was compelled to vist Florida to, among other matters, investigate a growing dispute between the missionizing Franciscan priests and the secular or parish priests (and you thought only we Baptists squabbled). In a later letter to Queen Mariana of Spain, Bishop Calderon gave, in addition to a remarkable description of the people and geography of the extreme southeastern continental United States, a list of all the missions therein. The descriptions of their locations and the distance scale between them cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, fit the Baker County area.
However, some missions were not so far away that they could not have exerted influence over the native population of Baker County. They were San Diego de Salamototo near present-day Tocoi on the Saint John's River, Santa Fe de Toloca and San Francisco de Potano near the present Gainesville, Santa Catalina in Columbia County, Santa Cruz de Ajohica near the fork of the Santa Fe and Suwannee Rivers, San Juan del Puerto on Fort George Island on the Saint John's, and Santa Maria on the island now named Amelia.
Most of these Franciscan missions were within a day's trotting journey for the aboriginal Baker Countians if they wished to embrace the faith and to travel to them for confessions and mass.
It is likely that the Baker County ancient people were culturally kin to those interior inhabitants described by Bihsop Calderon as, "the Chichimecos, heathen, so savage and cruel that their only concern is to assault villages, Christian and heathen, taking lives and sparing neither sex, age, nor state of life, roasting and eating the victims.."
In fact, the slight knowledge gained from second-hand reports and sifting through the meager remains of their mounds seem to indicate a less sedentary and agricultural life and less dependence on the Christianized mission society by the Baker County Amerindians. Whether or not the Church influenced them is probably an unanswerable question.
Most, or all, of the missions were ruthlessly destroyed by a coalition of Englishmen and Yamasee Indians under James Moore of South Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the midst of all the black legends surrounding the atrocities committed by early Spanish Catholics against the aboriginal Floridians and the French Protestant settlers, historians neglect to mention that in the space of six years, the Episcopalian Englishmen killed, enslaved, tortured, and mutilated more women, children, aged, and men of God than the Catholic Spaniards had in the previous two hundred years.
Governor, then Colonel, James Moore holds the dubious honor of destroying the original Florida inhabitants, including those of the present Baker County. The Spaniards cannot be held entirely blameless, for it was undoubtedly due to their emasculation of the Timaqua culture with a religion of peace and then settling them into a soft agrarian life that their continued existence became tenuous in a harsh age.
Another reason for disbelief in the legend of an early Saint Mary's mission is that the ancestors of those Crackers who repeated the story to your writer were separated from the time of the legend by a few to several hundred miles. In those days, as regards the Cracker capabilities and modes of travel, the distance might as well have been the same as the either of the poles. That the old timers who told the story were separated from the incident by almost three centuries (and remembering that many could not even remember their grandparents' names) pretty well concludes that the legend of a Baker County Catholic mission from the first Spanish Period is just that - a legend.

THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, March 19, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Catholicism in Baker County
Part Two
Not finding any evidences of Catholicism in the Baker County area during the first Spanish colonial period, we, now fascinated with the possibilities, decided to continue searching anyhow.
Going much further back in florida's history when Ponce de Leon made landfall in the vicinity of Ponte Vedra Beach during Easter week of 1513, Catholicism was within an Indian's day trotting distance of our county. But no Indian could have brought a story of the mass to the aborigines of this section because there was no priest on Ponce's first Florida visit. He was here on discovery and political and wealth-seeking business, and religion would have to come later.
It has been suggested that Conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez might have visited the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp soon after Easter, 1528. Priests accompanied his expedition, but whether they said mass in or near Baker County is a moot question.
Hernando de Soto explored Florida and the southeastern United States, beginning in 1539. He passed very near, it is believed, the southwestern corner of Baker County in the late summer of the same year. If historians' reconstruction of his and the priests' trip is correct, the Indians at Lulu were the first and nearest to have the opportunity to witness the rites of the Church in this neighborhood.
Some historians have placed de Soto attempting to cross the Okefenokee Swamp. Others have maintained that the great swamp in the chronicles of de Soto's travels was not the Okefenokee but one of the extensive river swamps of the south. A Spanish map of 1542 indicated the Okefenokee rather plainly on the Florida-peninsula's upper edge. Although the swamp's presence might have been gleaned from local Indian tales, the Catholic Spaniards were still mighty close to this area to have learned of it and we can be certain that the Baker County area was touched or known by the Spanish sometime prior to 1542. Catholicism was very near or in Baker County no less than 439 years ago.
As mentioned in last week's column, no evidences of a Spanish mission can be found from the first colonial period. The same is true for the British interlude from 1763 to 1783. And we know it still held true for the second Spanish period of 1783 to 1821.
But Baker Gounty did have its near misses and fleeting associations with Catholicism in the early and mid 1800's. Many of the colonists introduced during the time when Florida was owned by Great Britain were Mediterranean Catholics, mostly from the island of Minorca off the coast of Spain. Some of these colonists were (quite coincidentally we might add) members of the house of Florida's first known European explorer, Juan Ponce de Leon, and ancestors of some of Baker County's most noteworthy citizens of the nineteenth century. But for the time being they were mostly confined to the coasts and would not influence this county until the early 1800's.
In the 1790's, King Carlos ruled that the Church should make an attempt to reach the hundreds of Anglo-Americans settlers who were residing in north Florida. Governor Zespedes and Father Michael O'Reilly made a lengthy tour of northeast Florida to determine how many English-speaking Irish priests would be needed to missionize the Higganbothams, Crewses, Gaineys, Greens, Hicks, etc. living in the present Nassau and Duval Counties. They visited along the Saint Mary's River as far south as Brandy Branch, and discovered that the Cracker residents of Spanish Florida were not only receptive of them but many had expressed a desire for their children to receive religious instruction whenever the priests arrived.
Four missionaries were sent to West Florida, but none made it to East Florida. As Father Michael V. Gannon, noted Florida historian, put it: "It was another case of lost opportunity resulting from the complicated machinery of the patronato real." The patronato real meant simply that Florida and the Church were directly under the Spanish King, and Spanish Kings and their courts were notorious procrastinators.

THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, March 26, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Catholicism in Baker County
Conclusion
It is an amusing diversion to wonder what would have happended if..." in history. Had Florida remained under the crown of Spain for a couple more generations and had the crown sent the planned English-speaking priests as mentioned in last week's column, Maryland might not have been the only Catholic state or territory in the young union.
In history a miss is as good as a mile, and the Anglo-American pioneers in northeast Florida remained either mostly unchurched or rudimentary Baptists. But northeast Florida was not exclusively the home of Anglo-Americans; pioneers of Meditertanean blood were moving in from the coast, and most brought at least vestiges of the Mother Church with them.
From Fernandina-Old Town came the Ponce family (both the English habit of slurring and frontier illiteracy brought about the present form "Pons"). They settled for a while in west Nassau County, crossed over into the Georgia Bend, and, in the 1840's and '50's, lived in the Providence Village (Union County) section. When Francisco Juan (Francis John) Pons' wife died, he remarried a Baptist, and his Catholicism lay in a somewhat arrested state.
After the War Between the States, the new county of Baker promised to be a site of new beginnings for many. The Pons family sought its fortune there and lived in the Cedar Creek and Oak Grove areas. They were not known to have practiced the Roman rites while living in the county, but one of their number - Francis - is said to have resumed his ties with the Catholic Church after he moved to Tallahassee to become Treasurer of the State of Florida.
Both Francis (Baker County Clerk of Court) and his brother Charly (sheriff) left many a namesake in Baker County. It has been suggested by several old-timers that many of the Cracker ladies named their children Frank Ponce and Charly Ponce for more reasons than the appeal of the Pons boys' names.
The Canovas came from Saint Augustine to Jacksonville and Bradford County, and one branch of the family moved to Sanderson about the time of the Civil War. This clan descended from Italians from the wild Apennines and were fiercely independent. The Church seems to have never had a strong hold on most of them. A few of the old-time Canovas remained Catholic, but most were Baptists or unchurched and did not re-embrace Catholicism.
The Alvarez and Andreu families of New River retained some Catholicism, but their marriages with non-Catholics and the great distances from churches and missions diluted their fervor in the mid-1800's. Many worked and lived in Baker County and eventually became Baptists in the late 1800's. Several, although two or three generations removed from the Church, returned to the Catholic faith in the twentieth century.
Why the Primitive Baptist Religion was first choice in the absence of a Catholic Church is a moot question. There were Episcopal and Methodist Churches throughout Baker County and contiguous counties.
The writer's g-g-g-grandmother Marie Leah Barber was a member of the Alvarez clan of Saint Augustine and, although a Baptist, was descended from Catholic forebears and was open to influence from her Catholic parents-in-law Mr. and Mrs. William Barber. William and his wife lived on Trall Ridge just inside the present Baker County and as former Spanish subjects had become Catholics in the latter years of the 1700's. They were visited by Father Thomas Hassett during his work among the northeast Florida inhabitants in 1790.
The first known Catholic Bishop of Baker County was Bishop Michael Portier, who with a young Scotch Presbyterian traveling companion traversed this area in the summer of 1827.
The next bishop to have any known association with the county was referred to by the late John Barber of Palatka as..."old Bishop Veero stopped by to see Grandmother in Macclenny during the War. "Of course there was no McClenny during the Civil War, but there was indeed a Bishop Verot - Bishop Jean Pierre Augustin Marcellin Verot, a native of France.
Known as the "Rebel Bishop" because of his strong pro-Confederate sermons and tracts, he disliked Yankee Abolitionists and never hesitated to preach against them. He did not disapprove of slavery but did disapprove of ill teatment of slaves.
During the Federal occupation of Saint Augustine he fled with the Sisters of Mercy for the comparative safety of Savannah. His journey was circuitous, and it is known that he passed through Baker County. Perhaps it was at this time that he stopped over for his reputed visit.
The original title for this little series was "Catholicism In, Near, and Through Baker County," and that is just about what the early days of the Church's relationship was with the county. It remained for the second half of this century for Catholicism to gain a secure and lasting foothold in Baker County with the establishment of Saint Mary's Mission west of McClenny.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, April 2, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Children of the Confederacy
The War between the States ceased 116 years ago. All the veterans of that conflict have died. Most of the wounds on the land have been erased by the elements.
That war altered the course of the individual and collective states, secured freedom for an entire race, restricted the progress of the southern tier of states for a century, save an enormous permanent advantage to the northern states, and created prejudices (and emphasized existing ones) from and toward both belligerents that continues even today.
Many had no idea why they were fighting, but an intense loyalty to their section of the country brought volunteers out in droves, South and North; Others fought for ideals, and some of those crossed sectional limits to do so. When the last of them died, an era was gone.
Our one tie with those men of our dramatic, tragic, and romantic past is their few remaining children. For that reason we can properly regard those people as National Treasures. Baker County is the native home of two and the adopted home of another - Mrs. Mary Raulerson Starling, Mr. John Theron Groves, and Mr. John J. DuFour, respectively.
Mrs. Starling is the daughter of Private Joe Raulerson, CSA; Mr. Groves is the son of Private John Groves, CSA; and Mr. DuFour is the son of Private Louis DuFour, CSA. All three Confederates were natives of Georgia. The first two became farming citizens of Baker County, and the last spent many years in this county as a lumberman. All three Confederates participated in the Battle of Olustee.
Mrs. Starling is one of those sincerely sweet and low profile ladies of whom the South has always been so proud and for whom the South has always been most grateful. She is a member of a family that has contributed heavily to Baker County and one for which this writer has always held a special affinity (one of his favorite Baker County personalities was her brother, Mr. Hance "Hayball" Raulerson, who was so long associated with this writer's family).
Mrs. Starling is the mother and grandmother of many Baker Countians who have been successful in business, and she is the grandmother of the county's present Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tim Starling. Mr. Groves has been known to this writer about as long as anybody and is well known for his wit and pleasant manner. Your writer had the privilege to attend school with Mr. Groves' three sons, and he knows that the intelligence, demeanor, and gentlemanly qualities of those three men speak well for the influence of John Theron Groves. More men like Mr. Groves and his wife (who is, by-the-way, a daughter of the aforementioned Mrs. Starling) would prevent much of the tragedies and heart-breaks so prevalent in modern society.
Mr. John J. DuFour has been known by this writer for the past several years and has been most helpful in reconstructing much of the history of this county. Mr. DuFour's knowledge of the Civil War's Florida Campaign came from reading his father's journal and actually hearing the Olustee participant's own words. Mr. DuFour has added to that knowledge by studies in and from the national archives. Mr. DuFour is one of the last of those cultured gentlemen of the Old South.
The Baker County Historical Society recently extended honorary life memberships to Mrs. Starling, Mr. Groves, and Mr. DuFour. Your writer is privileged to have made the nominations and is pleased that the entire active membership concurred that they be so honored.
Baker County, you possess a unique treasure in these people.
This column desires information on any children of Confederate Veterans and on children of former slaves for possible nominations as honorary life members in the Society.
TOTALLY UNRELATED ITEM
Your writer would be pleased to have his readers view an exhibition of his paintings of Baker County at the Beaches Arts and Crafts Gallery at 319 North First Street, Jacksonville Beach, until April 15 and join him at a reception at the Gallery on this Saturday and Sunday from 2 until 4. Any unfortunates and grouches who have yet to experience the joys of reading our weekly effusions are invited too.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, April 9,1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial - Part one

In 1881, halfway between Jacksonville and Lake City, George L. Taber detrained at a tiny crossroads settlement.

The climate was salubrious and the soil fertile. The land, lying almost untilled since 1864, had been transformed by nature to hardwood hammocks lending it a semi-tropical aspect. Dotting the area were small farms belonging to native Crackers and to transplanted Northerners.

Most of the residents were cautious and courteous. They showed young Mr. Taber the countryside, and he became enamored of the gentle hills and sepia-toned Saint Mary's River.

Mr. Taber chose the sylvan spot for his new home and suggested for it the euphonious name "Glen St. Mary."

He and the other Northern folk laid plans for their new community, and, although it failed as a winter resort when south Florida became available, it was successful for many years as a renewed beginnings haven for several families from the upper midwest and border states.

Glen St. Mary survived and, this year, celebrates its centennial.

It would be a mistake to equate Glen's formal beginnings with its age as a settled community. The high clay hills east of town were the home of prehistoric peoples, and the later Anglo-American farmers' cultivation of those hills turned up much evidence in points and pottery pieces of a lengthy and heavy habitation.

Those early people the Timucua were probably gone from the area by the early 1700's. They gravitated toward Saint Augustine and the missions south and west of Glen in order to place themselves under the protection of the Spanish. By the beginning of the nineteenth century they had been completely replaced by the Georgia and Alabama Creeks who had helped the English extirpate them. Added to that new population were Seminoles who drifted up from the Alachua prairies.

With the end of the Second Spanish Period a different settler moved in. Relentlessly, this new pioneer slowly, but ever so surely, eased in and crowded the Indians out. The new pioneer was of British Isles stock, toughened by a few generations of frontier living in America and by countless generations of almost animalism in the wilds of northern Europe and Britain. He would not be stopped until he had touched his plow to every available acre of land.

Among the first of these hardy pioneers was Daniel John Mann and his wife LeVicy (an old form of "Louisa"). They arrived in 1829 and set up housekeeping among hostile Indians on the South Prong of the Saint Mary's River near the old Jacksonville- Alligator Road (parts of that route remain as parts of Woodlawn Cemetery Road and the Glen Nurseries' Lover's Lane and Smokey Road).

In that same year and on the same River, but on the Jacksonville-Tallahassee Road (this ran far north of the present Glen), another pioneer by the name of John Barber settled. He would be dead before the end of the year in a pre-dawn Indian attack.

By 1830 a few more Americans had moved in, and we shall begin to list them next week with a continuing history of "the Glen", as some of the old-timers used to call it. However, we shall end this first installment with an appeal to the city fathers of Glen Saint Mary to feel out their constituents' attitudes about a centennial commemoration.

This column well knows that celebrations and memorials are not directly and completely necessary to the physical needs and existence of a community; but we maintain that there is not a county-community within the confines of the United States that is in more dire need of spirit-raising than ours. A fun and reflective shin-dig would come in mighty handy at this time {and would be worth the expense. Why not use Glen's birthday as our worthy excuse to do so?
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, April 16, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial Part two

We do not know who was the first American to settle the Glen Saint Mary site, but we do know that Daniel Mann was there in late 1829. Family tradition claims there were no previous residents near his new home. Until some creditable evidence of an earlier inhabitant is uncovered, the Manns can be considered the first permanent settlers of Glen.

The widow of the area's other earliest pioneer, Mrs. John Barber (her name is believed to be either Ellinor or Maragareth), moved east across the South Prong immediately after her husband met his death from an Indian's gunshot.

Closely following the Mann's arrival were others, mostly transitory. Among the more permanent were Mrs. Mary Norton, John Fry, Daniel Norton, Thomas Goolsby, Asa Wilkerson (Wilkinson), John Osteen, and Joseph Locklear.

The 1830 census schedule for the present Glen Saint Mary section is missing, and we have only these names handed down by tradition.

Mr. Fry was gone before the 1840 census was taken; the Nortons (their relationship, if any, is unknown to this writer) had removed to Macedonia and environs; Mr. Locklear supposedly settled near Jacksonville (one old head told this writer that Mr. Locklear was a free black, but Locklear's ease in moving about and owning property seems to discount the claim); John Osteen moved away and back several times; Asa Wilkerson drifted into the Clay Hill section of Clay County; and Mr. Goolsby finally settled at the present Cedar Creek Cemetery neighborhood and set up a slave-powered sawmill..

By 1850 the Cotton Field, as our subject area was becoming known, was, in addition to being the nut orchard and cotton field of across-the-river resident Mose Barber, a temporary home for several new citizens (not all were new in the county; many were old-line pioneers). They were Leroy Thrift, Hampton Kersey, David Raulerson, James Daugharty,. Leonard Osteen, Benjamin Osteen, Manning Griffis, Job Manning, and Joseph M. Hale. Most had moved away before the outbreak of the Civil War to the present Union County and to the Georgia Bend. Dan and Levicy Mann remained throughout the changes of population.

When the county was established in 1861 the Cotton Field had another name, but it has been lost from the mind of this writer. He does remember the old-timers calling it " - Corners" (can anybody help with the old name?).

The Cotton Field also was becoming more populated. Lewis Berry, Calvin Osteen, Judge R. Hodges, William Alexander, Joseph Kelly, Elisha Hunter, Richard Harvey, John Rhoden, Francis Pons, and E.M. Anderson were known to be residents at that time.

After the Civil War there was a great shifting of the population, and the Glen area was losing many of the Crackers to the sawmills at Sanderson, Olustee, Darbyville, and in other counties along the railroad. Some moved south to the more fertile prairies north of the Okeechobee to raise their cattle or to the balmy stretches along the Saint Johns River to grow oranges.

The fields were largely abandoned and waited to be picked up for taxes by a slow but sure influx of Northerners and displaced Southerners from the Old Dominion and the Carolinas.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, April 23, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS Gene Barber
The rape of the Osceola Forest

The timeliness and emergency nature of this week's subject prompts this column to break sequence in the Glen Saint Mary series. if you are sympathetic with the views expressed, immediately write Senator Paula Hawkins to strongly urge her to support a bill introduced by Senator Chiles and Congressman Fuqua to prohibit strip mining in the Osceola Forest.

When the Osceola National Forest was established in the thirties, some of the old time Crackers viewed it as their economic salvation. Many willingly sold land to the Federal Government to ward off the wolves of the Great Depression.

Although Baker Countians were not faring as poorly as those in other parts of the nation, they were caught up in the hysteria of the times, and, from Lightered Bridge to Ocean Pond, they moved away from land held by their families for a century.

Others say another type of boon in the Osceola Forest - a perpetual reservation of wild lands to feed the soul, a refuge for animal and plant life necessary to the environmental well being of mankind and those beings over which he had been given dominion, a stabilizing influence on the state's water supply, a continuing renewable resource of wood and naval stores, and a Nimrod's paradise.

It was an area of historical significance. One of the heaviest concentrations of prehistoric peoples in interior northeast Florida had been along the Middle Prong. Some of the county's earliest Anglo-American settlements lay within the Forest. It was the home of Confederate guerrilla leader George Combs and of Indian War veteran Jocham Williams.

General, later President, Zachary Taylor had ridden between Big and Little Gum Swamps. Florida's first CCC camp was established within its borders, and the site of Florida's only major battle of the War Between the States was adjacent to it. Some believe the great Florida patriot Osceola lived there as a child.

The Forest was among the last homes of the probably now extinct Ivory Bill Woodpecker. Some of Florida's last sleek, beautiful, and beleagured panthers roamed its swamps until recently. North Florida's last red wolves barked and howled there until around 1912.

The Forest is home to Epidendrum conopsium, the continent's northernmost epiphytic orchid, and a lovely pink and mahogany Isotrla species (neither getting any more plentiful with mankind's incessant urban encroachment).

When farming was gone, open range cattle raising moved in. After naval stores products were replaced by synthetics, pulpwooding filled the void. And although clear-cutting is ugly, the young pine woods always return to answer the demand for paper, and a steady income has been realized from the Forest.

Osceola has been discovered in our recent history by our urban neighbors who need the quiet therapy of its sylvan retreats. Sportsmen and campers might not always endear themselves to our hearts due to their sometimes careless manner of treatment to old Osceola, but we have learned to enjoy the company of their dollars.

Now, some businessmen have come into our midst and talked of their rights to strip away "only eighteen percent" of this heritage, refuge, and perpetual income. They spoke of feeding the hungry, controlling the world's food supply, riches to Baker County, God, Arabs, and leaving the raped land better than it was before...all laudable or interesting topics.

But we say this to you, Baker County: eighteen percent is too much (one teaspoonful is too much); in spite of the propaganda to the contrary, the U.S. isn't hungry yet, and we can leave that phosphate in the ground until we truly need it (any earlier digging sounds like old fashioned greed); denuded and leached sand left after the mining brings in nothing and supports nothing (go view the wastes of Polk, Hamilton, and Bradford Counties and behind Jacksonville's Regency Square); and as for re-claiming the land, just review the last parenthetical suggestion.

This writer has seen an eagle painstakingly build her nest (the only one this writer has seen in Baker County), and he later saw her soar and scream over the chopped down nest tree and missing eaglets, the victims of economic advantages (read "greed").

This writer knows of one stand of rare orchids mashed into the mud under wheels and blades of economic necessity (read "avarice").

We have seen the roasted babies and unhatched eggs of a colony of eastern bluebirds, victims of economic improvement (read "egomanical gluttony").

We have watched trucks roll over and crush the bones and pottery of Middle Prong's peoples of a thousand years ago as an economic boost (read ..myopic stupidity").

Nowhere in English Common Law, the Codes of civilized peoples, the scriptures of the world's great religions, or in the minds of the most primitive man is it written that a color TV; a trip to Disneyworld, a recreational vehicle, or a house trailer on Sampson Lake gives any member of mankind the right to exterminate one colony of Bluebirds, a stand of albino nodding pogonlas, a nest of eaglets, or one Florida panther.

Don't let this happen to you or to your kids, Baker County.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, April 30, 1981 Page Two
The Glen Centennial
A photo story
We'll divert from our usual format this week and give you a look at some old photos in connection with the series on Glen St. Mary's upcoming Centennial. Last week, the Glen Town Council voted to become involved in the observance and we appreciate the interest. Below each photo you will notice a cutline explanation on who is pictured and how they fit into oldtime Glen. Next week, we'll return to our regular format.
Thank you,
Gene Barber
Note cwm: seven photos ommited here.
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, May 7, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial - Charly W. Turner

Charly W. Turner was a native of New York and was a descendant of New England stock. His wife Martha was New York Dutch. After a varied and exciting life, Mr. Turner arrived in the Glen section in May of 1869. "Grandfather was looking for a nice place to buy and live", mentioned a granddaughter over a century later.

He constructed a small sawmill lumber house on the Jacksonville Lake City Road (not to be confused with the separate and more northerly Jacksonville- Tallahassee Road) which lay approximately on the Lovers Lane and Smokey Road routes through the present Glen Nurseries. This little house could be seen just south of the Expressway on top of the clay cut on Road 125 until several years ago (the writer's maternal grandparents were married there).

That land was easy enough to acquire since It had been confiscated from a former (and dead) Confederate, Isaiah Barber, and was relatively inexpensive for one with U.S. currency and U.S. sympathies. Mr. Turner was a veteran of the Mexican War, a retired insurance agent for Aetna (he sold in the West and Southwest), a former soldier in the recent Civil War, and, being somewhat thrifty, he had amassed a comfortable sum with which to buy his retirement home.

Barber's widow Lizzie once remarked, "It is God's will that somebody nice like the Turners bought the land rather than what we could have had." Most of the land in the Glen area was controlled by Mr. James Barnett, a lumber and naval stores operator south of Glen and Sanderson. In addition to the Barber land, Mr. Turner purchased the George J. Smith farm north of present Margaretta through Mr. Barnett and lived there for a while in the 1870's.

Mr. Turner was not a Carpet-bagger and had no time for those of that ilk, but he was representative of the people who had just trounced the Confederacy. Baker Countians had never, as a united group, been overly keen on the ideas of separating from the Union, but since the war there had been some understandable bitterness (we're not tossing out any opinions of who was right or wrong in that conflict but merely commenting on human nature). As a result, the Turners were at first shunned except by the oldest families. He commented in his dairy that the Mesdames Lizzie and Penny Barber and Mr. Jackson Mann had called on them and had offered assistance and had been ready to sell them livestock.

Also in Mr. Turner's dairy was recorded that the 5th and 6th of January, 1870, were the coldest days of the season and that the Glen section burned up; that much of his garden and orchard stock had come from New Mexico, and that his family attended Mr. Mann's church (now Manntown Congregational Holiness but then Methodist).

After a residence near Mt. Zion Church (now Turner Cemetery), the Turners returned to Glen where he lived his last days.

At the same time, or earlier, the related families of Walter Drake and Ben Gurganus arrived in the Glen area, but both opted to settle a little west and founded Newburg and Drake's Station on the railroad, but it was the Gurganus home "Margaretta" (near the Turner Mt. Zion home) that became the final name of the train stop.

In 1875 James Hamilton Powers purchased land from a local land dealer James Mott north of the present Glen (near the original John Barber settlement of 1829). Mr. Powers was a restless gentleman who had moved all over Charlton County, much of Nassau and Duval, but reached his last and favorite home near Glen. On the land at the time was a giant pecan tree, and he built his home under its outermost branches.

Mr. Powers remained there until his death in 1897 and is buried on the original homestead. The pecan tree, one of Baker County's living treasures, is still standing east of Road 125 and south of Kirkland Branch.

A Confederate widow, Mrs. Caroline Kersey Lauramore, moved to the south Glen section in the 1870's and, due to her straitened circumstances, hired herself out to retired sea captain Roger Vaughn and his wife Martha as housekeeper. Mrs. Lauramore marveled at the treasures of art and exotic bricabrac in the sprawling Vaughn house. Of especial interest to Mrs. Lauramore were the floor rugs all through the home (probably among the first floor coverings other than white river sand in the county).

The venerable Horace "Bruiser" Lauramore recalled his wonder at the statuary, and a particular painting of a branch of oranges remained in his mind for a hundred years. Mr. Lauramore, who just recently passed away, spent the last many years of his life surrounded by art of the most valued employee of Jacksonville's Cummer family and Gallery.

Captain Vaughn died, leaving a host of children named in his honor and one very bitter, alcoholic wife. The unfortunate widow Vaughn picked arguments with her neighbors, stayed in court, took in a disreputable doctor and attorney, and then moved to Jacksonville where the bottle took credit for her demise.

The Vaughn Place is mentioned now by only a very few. Some recall Vaughn's Wash Hole on the South Prong. Most know the farm as the Eiserman Place, but before Mr. Eiserman and others like that industrious gentleman arrived to remake the Glen area, we must introduce the extraordinary George L. Taber, Sr, and the shrewd businesswoman Theresa Tilton. But we shan't introduce them until next week.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, May 14, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial 'The second Yankee invasion'

Since the re-discovery of Florida during the post-Civil War boom, developers were founding communities faster than the map. makers and tourist guide books could include them.
Jacksonville and Saint Augustine were the state's tourist centers in 1881 when the young George L. Taber arrived in Florida for his health. He toured the countryside, detrained about an hour west of Jacksonville, and fell in love with the area. He asked himself, "Could I make a living out of the land?" Thinking back on his doctor's prediction that he would probably not survive but a year or two even in Florida's salubrious climate, Mr. Taber decided to give it a try.

With the help of a local resident, Thomas P. Beath, George Taber erected a log cabin, cleared land, set out fruit and nut trees, established the Glen Nurseries and Glen Saint Mary. He issued his first catalogue a year later.

"The first settler at Glen St. Mary was Miss T.M. Milton Tilton, in October, '82. She is the postmistress and the owner of a hotel which she soon after built to accommodate the rapidly growing population and the transient public. About 15 families have settled there. It is situated on a south prong of the St. Marys river about 1/2 mile from the main stream, and on the Transit Railroad, one hour from Jacksonville, from which place it can be reached at an expense of $1.50."

This was published in a Florida guidebook by Webb in 1885. Mr. Webb goes on to say "Most of the land upon this town-site and nearly all of the surrounding country for several miles each direction not sold to other parties belongs to the Hon. C.B. McClenny, who is also closely identified with the fortunes of McClenny, another town near by.

"New England, Kansas and Kentucky people are found there; generally.

"It is generally considered a good place in which to make and save money. Talbott & Co., Jacksonville, Fla., are agents for the lands at this point."

Miss Tilton continually acquired land and, at the outbreak of the yellow fever epidemic in 1888, was considered one of Glen's most important landlord's. (landpersons?). Mr. Jesse E. Cole, no slouch in the brain and Opportunity grabbing department, asked for and received Miss Tilton's hand in marriage in 1888.

She was Glen's second appointment to the office of postmaster (22 September, '83), following D. Lansing Skinner. She was re-appointed as Theresa M. Cole on 20, April, 1887. After the fever epidemic, the Coles slipped quietly from the Glen scene.

By 1885, some of the Northern and Border State land owners, other than those just mentioned, were Arabella A. Tilton, C.B. Tilton, James Underhill, Charles and Lizzie Turner, Walter M. and, Lilly Turner, Henry M. Gould, Aubrey Frink, Emma and Lawrence Hough, Homer G. Tabor, and U.S. (Jr.) and Fannie Grant (does the last gentleman's name strike a familiar note?)

Mr. Webb, in the manner of most of those Northern writers of the post Civil War period (and representative of the much self-touted prejudice-free North,) totally ignored the host of Davis, Harvey Rhoden, Alexander, Johnson, and Raulerson families who had begun to drift south and east into Glen and its environs. In fact, Mrs. Webb never listed a Southerner unless he had money, dismissed blacks as un-noteworthy in a literary sense, and conceded a line or two to females only when they were exceptional in business and wealth.

(There...we've tended to our editorializing for the week. Just relating history without occasionally lapsing into the didactic was beginning to work on our nerves)

Among the Glen hotel's (name not learned by this column) guests were U.S. Grant (Jr.), Mr. Bradley, George E. Wilson, Messrs Coloney and Talbott, and Dr. Horace Berry.

Mr. Grant purchased land along the railroad right-of-way west of Glen but sold out to George Taber, and Glen Saint Mary's brush with the near famous was over before it began. Mr. Bradley was a famous fertilizer manufacturer from Boston, and several of his relatives continued to winter in Glen and McClenny for many years (some are buried in Woodlawn.)

Mr. Wilson was Bradley's employee and eventually established his own fertilizer business in Jacksonville and became quite wealthy in the central Florida orange groves. He also was instrumental in developing Altamonte Springs when the Orlando area was opened by the railroad.

Mr. Coloney, a native of Virginia but an adopted son of Ohio, came to Jacksonville for a recuperative visit and stayed. Mr. Talbott was of Southern extraction but was born in Indiana He retired from the United States Army as a captain after the Civil War and came to Jacksonville due to failing health The two, as Coloney, Talbott, and Company, became real estate agents for the town of Edgewood (now a suburb of Jacksonville.) They later associated themselves with Captain McClenny (supposedly some kinship among them) to sell Glen Saint Mary and to plat out the city of McClenny in 1883.

Dr. Berry was from Boston and was a graduate of Harvard (1871). He owned a pharmacy at no. 9 East Bay in Jacksonville, and, according to the economical standards of the 1880's, was residing in a house reportedly constructed two years earlier (owned for many years by J.E. Franklin and now the home of Hershel Mobley).

Dr. Berry's claim to fame (an invidious honor in this case) was to have brought the devastating yellow fever epidemic to Baker County in 1888. It was said by the old timers that he took the train home on an August Friday evening, as was his usual course, feeling ill. By October of '88, five years to the month since his arrival in Florida, Dr. Berry was dead, three Episcopal Churches closed forever, two communities disappeared, Woodlawn and Manntown Cemeteries filled, and the Second Yankee Invasion" of winter guests and recuperating and retired residents was over.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, May 21, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial - More faces from the past.

No text, only pictures, including: "The entire Glen School, 1908"; "Picture Postcard, Copyrighted 1909"; "A Sunday outing and picnic at Vaughn's Wash Hole about 1910" and "Picnic at the turn of the century"
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, May 28, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
History of the arts here

We will, on occasion, break sequence in a series to pick up on a timely topic. Because of the county arts and crafts day this Saturday in downtown McClenny, we shall interrupt our Glen columns and bring you some notes on the arts in Baker County's history.

Any people who have had to spend the greater portion of their past taking care of their bellies and backs (typical of Baker County) could claim little leisure time which to pursue the arts. Although the arts did not flourish amid the adverse circumstances of their past, it is to the credit of old-time Baker Countians that the arts did exist.

Among the earliest of the literary arts here was some poetry written by Professor George T. Swain, a McClenny post Civil War school teacher. Professor Swain, a native of New Hampshire and a long time resident of North Carolina, arrived in this county soon after the War (incidentally, his brother Charles had been camped as a U.S. soldier at Barber's Plantation prior to the Battle of Ocean Pond where he was captured).

Your writer knows of one existing book of Swain's Baker County produced poetry, and he hopes to acquire it for the local Library.

Shakespeare's plays were no strangers to many Baker Countians. The porches of the McClenny Hotel served as stages for traveling troupes of players in the 1880's. It was said that intermissions were planned to coincide with the arrival of the train as that latter event was of great consequence to the entire community.

Since the town's cows were free to roam at will, especially among the lush grassy mall adjacent to the railroad and the hotel, several young lads were hired to wield shovels prior to every performance.

Taylor School celebrated its "turning out" in 1913 with an elaborate production of a Mid-summer's Night Dream.

McClenny's grassy mall, sans cow stuff, was also scene of the town's community band concerts at the turn of century. The writer s grandfather and great uncle doubled as members of the town band and of the Turkey Creek Nurseries Concert Band.

The cultural heirs of the concerts and plays were Miss Jeter, county music teacher of 1930's, and the lovely "Miss Fay" (nee Matthews) Milton. We recall Miss Fay's stunning costuming and the dramatic lighting and when the curtains got stuck they had to be pulled across the stage by a grinning barefoot stage hand from the fifth grade.

Piano teacher Mrs. Clara Lott was responsible for a refreshing innovation in music recitals in the 1940's. She used her front porch as a stage, invited the young musicians' parents and friends to park along her fence, and...Baker County's first drive-in piano recital.

The late Eloise (nee Knabb) Milton, one of the brightest talents to ever grace the cultural scene of this county, organized a community choir in the forties.

Dr. John Holt, our amazing and ever-young genius, could produce an Easter pageant that would make Oberammergau sit up and take notice (not to mention his accomplishment in oil painting).

A dance school was conducted in the 1930's in the McClenny Woman's Club, but the most notable pioneer in the dance, locally, was Kathryne (nee Klein) Jones. A list of her former students would read like a local's who's who. Her biggie contribution to the county's arts history was her dance revue in 1953. It was star studded, memorable, and backed with imaginative sets and costuming. Your writer made his debut as an artist as set designer for the revue.

Baker Countians have always been good craftspeople. Your writer recalls the intricate and well crafted pine straw articles created by the kids at Keller School under the tutelage of Mrs. Juanita Lewis at the Pine Tree Festivals in the late 1940's.

Captain Roger Vaughn had in the 1870's the county's first art collection. He lived south of Glen Saint Mary, and his home was a veritable museum.

Close by, the founder of Glen and the Glen Nurseries George L. Taber later gathered a fine collection of European art work. His son George became an accomplished painter in oils.

In the 1920's, a small caravan from Alabama drove into Baker County, and at its head was Mrs. Minnie (nee Mitchell) Poythress, an artist in the best academic tradition. She excelled as a china painter also, and the historic Poythress House was a gallery for her outstanding art and craft.

The late Dexter Milton was probably the county's first fine art painter. Self-taught, Mr. Milton produced several paintings in his youth that rank with the best this writer has ever judged (and he has judged many). Your writer was privileged to view a number of his paintings several years ago, and he grieves that the man's talents were never introduced to the world.

And your writer, once so presumptuous and bold, envisioned himself as an artist. He saw other kids with special interests happily pursuing their chosen fields in the local public schools, but nothing was offered to would-be artists. But the forward thinking of Superintendent of Public Instruction L.L. Dugger and his Board remedied that situation and announced in 1960 that school art would become a reality. Your columnist instituted school art and worked himself to a frazzle with almost no funds except his own.

A small core of us began feebly at first to bring art shows to the public in the mid sixties. These exhibitions grew fitfully into sidewalk shows amid a few McClenny merchants' gripes about having their windows blocked by "them pictures."

Mr. Milton turned to sign painting. Mrs. Poythress puttered about in her flowers. Some have gone on to the ultimate great studio. Some of us have simply burned out. There is a new generation to whom we've passed the brush and palette. In Baker County, the arts will continue.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS Thursday June 4, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Glen in the 1880's
Since Glen St. Mary's founding in 1881, it had grown to such proportions by 1885 that the Board of County Commissioners set up a committee composed of Charles Eiserman, W.H. Congleton, H.L. Reed, and George L. Taber to examine and divide Districts One and Three (Sanderson and McClenny, respectively) for the purpose of creating Glen District Five.
The description of the new precinct was as follows: "commencing at the County line on the south, the east line shall be the Range line dividing 21 and 22, running north to said line, until it intersects the South Prong of Little St. Marys until it empties into the St. Marys River. The west line shall be the Middle line of Range 21 and running from the Bradford County line on the South until it intersects the St. Marys River on the North."
For a number of years, the residents of the east county had agitated to have the seat of county government transferred from Sanderson to the newer and busier community of Darbyville (McClenny). In early 1886, a vote was held, and Glen went for the courthouse removal 30 to 12. The Glen precinct Inspectors were Isaac B. Mann, James M. Strickland, and George L. Taber.
Some interesting sidelines to the vote were (1) Mr. Mann represented the earilest known settler of Glen (J. Dan Mann). Mr. Strickland represented the after-the-war Southern settlers as well as having moved onto the land once settled by Glen's other earilest known settler (John Barber), and Mr. Taber was the gentleman who founded Glen, and (2) Walter A. Drake of Margaretta-Drake's Station rode to victory in the State Assembly on the coat tails of the Courthouse removal since he was very vocal about favoring it.
A Glen resident (and husband of the town's first resident after its official beginning) Jesse E. Cole tackled incumbent David H. Rowe for State Assembly in 1892 and was soundly trounced. Neither were natives, but Mr. Rowe had lived in the county for 20 years as compared to Mr. Cole's 10 years residency.
In that same year native M.G. Berry "walked all over" Northerner J.E. Chamblers for Glen's Justice of the Peace. In 1896, Glen and McClenny were the only two precincts to fulfill the election laws properly, and because of irregularities among the other precincts, that year was decided "no election" by the State Canvassing Board.
No one in Glen qualified for the local constabulary in 1904 and 1906. A new citizen of Glen, but not of the county, was Tom C. Carrol, a Confederate veteran from South Carolina. He was unopposed for Clerk of Court in 1904, and he later moved to McClenny. Glen resident William Roy Simmons won a heavy victory that year for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Ander Townsend of Kentucky and a Glen merchant was elected as Glen's county commissioner over native H.M. Sweat. Mr. Townsend later was chosen as chairman of the Board. Brantly Fraser won handily over his opponents for Glen's representative to the School Board.
In 1908, a newcomer to Glen, Wiley Hicks, bested his opponents for Glen's seat on the County Commission. It was said that his constituents were afraid of not voting for Mr. Hicks. Mr. Hicks, by-the-way, was a great-grandfather of popular country singer Mel Tillis. Brantly Fraser was returned as School Board member, and Henry Davis won over George Weeks for Justice of the Peace.
Some of Glen's residents who were paying taxes on town lots in 1883 were Jonothan D.B. Andrews, Charles Eiserman, Mary A. Gould, Eliza Hastings, Henry B. Holmes, and Theresa M. Tilton. In the area around Glen, some of the most extensive acreages were owned by James M. Baker (for whom the county was named); Abraham D. Cole; Charles Eiserman; Florida Land and Improvement Company of New Jersey, Inc.; Florida and Mortgage Company, Ltd.; Florida Railroad and Navigation Company; Fannie C. Grant (daughter-in-law of President U.S. Grant); James M. Strickland (a giant of a lumberman who always wore red suspenders); Sir Henry Reed (he designed the modern British Navy); and C.B. McClenny.
In 1886, Charly Turner sold out his plantation near Turner Cemetery and moved back to Glen where he spent his last years.
In the spring of 1888, Glen was chosen as the prospective site of two estimable ventures the Baker County Refrigerating Company, Inc. and the Glen Mary College (don't know why the "Saint" was dropped). The yellow fever epidemic of that year's late summer aborted both projects.
Some of the teachers in the Glen school in the last years of the nineteenth century were James H. Congleton, W.R. Simmons, L.A. Duncan, J.R. Groover, J.R. Plympton, M.G. Berry, and Georgann Berry.
Soon the twentieth century was going strong. There was an attempt to make Glen a part of the twenties' Florida land boom, but most Northern folk preferred the more lower peninsula's clime. The great building period to house the influx gave impetus to the Glen Nurseries through the demand of landscaping material, and the locals were indirectly affected by the boom.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, June 11, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial - Conclusion

Although this is the conclusion of the Glen Saint Mary series it is but the beginning of the Glen Centennial. The Town Council voted unanimously to commemorate the community's first one hundred years. Tentative plans call for a big opening fling this fall and a joint town and nursery beautification effort in the spring of '82.
With the indulgence of our kind readers and the permission of our long suffering editor, we shall frequently devote a small corner to Glen, its story, and its celebration.

But now, we return to our narrative.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Glen was receiving its second flow of Northern colonists, this time not for winter residency but for full-time living.

Representative of the new influx was a young family from Chicago who detrained late one night. There were four-the father, a gentlemanly native of Virginia and a very capable bookkeeper; a pretty young mother with a babe in arms; and a tiny girl most unhappy at the prospect of entering a new life in the wilds of Florida.

The excitement of the long train trip could not compensate for her homesickness. She peered into the darkness of the little town and could see but one feeble light. She got sand in her shoes; an unfamiliar circumstance with her, and although that occasion has since been attributed with charming powers to bring the visitor back to Florida, the little lady was most distraught and begged to go home.

Although the little girl was the apple of her father's eye and he no doubt had some misgivings at the unpromising view before him, the die had been cast and the family stayed.

This writer is most thankful that they did remain. If our readers have noted a marked improvement in the mechanics, grammar-in-general, punctuation, and spelling in our little weekly effusions, it is because that young lady grew up to be not only the mentor and advisor to literally thousands of Floridians but also is the columnist's right hand and frequent savior. Her name is Miss Karlie Tyler.

Mr. A. Miller surveyed and mapped the town in 1911 and lettered the map's title and legend in characters that were to soon represent the Art Deco movement and the modernistic thrust into the twentieth century.

Mr. Geitsey, the principle realtor, named the streets in the manner of most Northern developers for the communities (in this case, the upper midwest) where most of his prospective buyers lived. A few thoroughfares honored U.S. presidents and a couple of streets paid homage to Glen's primary horticultural products - orange and pecan.

Through Mr. Taber's influence, many realty pamphlets were sent up North, and the buyers came. Not in droves, but in a small and steady stream. As in the days of the conquering tribes after Rome's heyday, this second gentle and industrious invasion was absorbed and almost completely Crackerized by the very people they were supposedly replacing. Many who could not succumb to the ways of the lower South returned home.

There was a recrudescence of Ku Klux Klan activity in the decade of the twenties, and Glen was the apparent Klan center of Baker County. The Klan's membership was swelled by the new Northern citizens, and all the night raids were not directed at the black community. Many a white gentleman believed guilty of family neglect and abuse was taken to Trail Ridge and treated to a flogging.

In light of the public's current lax attitude on those subjects and the bleeding hearts' undue concern for the civil liberties of the perpetrators of dastardly acts, the vigilante movement of those days, as seen in the perspective of time, doesn't seem like a wholly repugnant idea.

Most Glen Klansmen tossed off the sheets when directing their violence toward blacks. There are the all too-well-known stories of the anti-black signs at the town limits in those days, the train conductor's orders to pull down the shades and lie on the floor in the segregated black cars as they passed through Glen, and atrocities and retributions too gory for telling here.

There was never the great anti-Catholic attitude in Baker County and Glen as was evidenced in other parts of the country, especially the Midwest. In fact, several of the new Glen citizens were Catholic, and a couple hinted that their move to Glen had removed them from unpleasant circumstances up North. Some of the Catholics placed their faith into a state of dormancy until a more convenient time and others grew to like their new-found religion at the other end of the emotional spectrum-the Holiness Movement of the twenties-and remained in those churches for which Glen was becoming famous.

Out on the Nursery, women were being hired, a breakthrough for women's rights in the late twenties and early thirties. It was said of Mr. Taber that his Quaker background came through and, in the words of several old Crackers, "that he was against everything." He firmly and fatherly watched over the morals of his help, it is said, but now the truth can be told...there was hanky-panky going on at Glen Nursery (and on Mr. Taber's time too, but never in his eyesight).

Glen and the Nursery rearranged the population of the area with many families moving there from the Georgia Bend, Cedar Creek, and Sanderson. Little by little, the Glen as known by this writer in his youth emerged and evolved. He roamed the lanes, ate cookies in the Franklin Post Office, visited with Aunt Dolly Padgett, and sat on the porch with Grandma Mag to watch the traffic go by on U.S. 90 (and, incidentally, to watch Glen truly become part of the twentieth century).

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, June 18,1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
A Baker County map of 1840

One of this column's frequent bits of advice to amateur history researchers is there is no such thing as incontrovertible evidence; logically conclusive.

Many of them, guileless and gullible, retort with, "but my findings are documented," or, "It's on record," or, worse yet, " my data is based on conversations with my grandmother." Starting with the last: Grandmas can and will lie. As far as records and documents go, they are the products of human beings, and, as such, as liable to the same faults and failings.

We Barbers, it is said, will argue with sign posts. Well, sir, in the case of the 1940's mileage markers between Glen Saint Mary and McClenny, it paid to do so. In those days one could travel two miles from McClenny to get to Glen, but it took three miles on the same route to get back.

Take the case of the highly touted Florida Indian War maps of the nineteenth century now used so much for substantiation. Many were dependent on hearsay for their cartographic information and often were very wrong.

A signal ability of local historical researcher Dicky Ferry is to uncover data that seem to knock holes in accepted histories. He found in the National Archives a rare collection of those Indian War maps. Dated April eighth, 1840, and written at Fort Moniac, East Florida, the officer's name and rank are both illegible.

"Alterations- 1. Boundary line altered, placing Fort Moniac in Florida. 2. Hogan's Ferry located. 3. Fort Taylor located. 4. Ocean Pond and Station located. 5. Oulusta Cr. lengthened in order to cross Alligator Road near Ocean Pond. 6. Cedar Creek named. 7. Goldbys located and road leading therefrom to Elvington's Ferry, meeting Black Creek Road to Ft. Moniac: (illegible) also road to Fort Moniac on west side of the St. Mary's, 8. (illegible) from Alligator to Jacksonville a road and not a trail.- 9. Elvington's Ferry located. 10 Moats located. 11. Position (or portion) of Thigpen's in (size?) (as?) to junction of branch and big creek altered - and also roads in immediate vicinity thereof."

The accompanying map was copied as faithfully as possible. Our readers should be aware that this is a map of corrections, and that there were more settlements and roads than are depicted.
Note cwm: Map omitted here
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, June, 25, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Francis Marion Brown
Baker County's Brown family is old in America, having been established in Camden County, Georgia, and British East Florida since before the Revolution. Confederate Hugh Brown was a planter in the North Prong section well before the War Between the States and lived in the old blockhouse built by James M. Burnsed. His son Colquit's long tenancy in the historic structure lent it the name - the Coll Brown House - by which it is better known now.
Of all that family who distinguished themselves in their chosen fields, none has received a more efulgent account than that accorded Francis Marion Brown in the Encyclopedia of American Biography.
"Pioneer citrus grower in Dade County, hotel operator and former postmaster of Miami, an authority on the Florida everglades and their possibilities and a developer of Florida's resources, the late Francis Marion Brown helped to effect the improvements in Miami and the Miami area which make the city one of the foremost in the South today.
"He was born in Baker County, Florida October 18, 1881, and died in Miami, January 27, 1929, aged forty-seven years. The span of his life was short, as measured by the average; yet in that time he accomplished more than usually is done by a man in much more lengthy period of endeavor. He was a son of David Chappel and Henrietta (Hatcher) Brown. His mother, who died when he was seven years old, was a native of Traders Hill, Georgia, member of a house old in history of the Southland. His father, who died in 1898, was a planter and man of means, influential in the community of his residence, in Baker County, Florida. He was a veteran of the war between the States, and gave to his son, Francis Marion Brown, a valuable heritage of courage and vision, which helped materially to mould his career successfully.
"Francis Marion Brown received common school education at DeLand and New Smyrna, Florida, got the balance of his true education through experience, and early went into the field of active business which claimed his attention for the rest of his career. He began work on his brother's farm near DeLand, where he learned of citrus cultivation. When nineteen he came to Dade County, and as a pioneer resident here worked at tomato cultivation, for himself. Still later he worked in a store belonging to his brother in Dade County, removed to Jax, worked there in a wholesale grocery establishment, and when twenty-three became identified with the firm of Baker and Holmes, of Miami. For seven years he worked with this organization as a salesman, selling groceries as wholesaleman, and in 1914 was appointed postmaster of Miami, under President Wilson's administration. He served in this office until 1919, and while incumbent erected the Pershing Hotel, 1918. This was at that time the only first class commercial hotel property in the city of Miami. He dealt widely in realty, and was markedly successful in business up to time of his death.
"As early as 1923, Mr. Brown made the statement that drainage of the everglades for commercial purposes south of the South River Canal and east of the Miami Canal could be effected. It has been to the benefit of the area served. He was most familiar with the everglades, having hunted there with Indian guides many times. Mr. Brown's thorough knowledge of the nature and productivity of the everglades soil prompted him to buy thirty acres of muck land approximately eighteen miles from Miami, fronting on the Miami Canal and immediately adjoining the upper works of the Pennsylvania Sugar Plantation. He planted the whole of it to oranges and avocados, putting out 1,382 trees of the former and five hundred and eighty of the latter. Later he purchased a full section of land about five miles west of Davie, on which he set out 37,000 orange trees and 6,900 avocados, but during the hurricane of 1926 this grove was practically destroyed. Mrs. Brown is planning at this writing (1929) to replant part of this grove. Mr. Brown's success in cultivating everglades demonstrated what could be done in a section theretofore considered nearly worthless. His practical ideas, and the demonstrations thereof, will go down in the history of the reclamation program of Florida as important and decisive factors in the extension of agricultural acreage in the Commonwealth.
"...A self-made man, he had attributes which endeared him to associates. Sympathy and charity and honor were his outstanding characteristics: he was kindly, helped the Seminole Indians in every manner possible, helped the needy, oppressed, and halt; and became one of the city's outstanding figures in works of good. He was especially considerate of older people and of children. He lived a life clean and honest, and his memory is perpetuated through the facts of a replete career of accomplishment. He was always very liberal to his family."
CORRECTION:(last week, we thought we had a very good line with "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INCONTROVERTIBLE EVIDENCE: logically conclusive, perhaps, but not incontrovertible." Somehow an entire line was dropped rendering our very good sentence two degrees the other side of stupid-sounding. Heaven knows we endeaver to be lucid, but some weeks nothing seems to work out right.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, July 2, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Cracker Manifesto

This week's column marks the sixth year of our weekly effusions in the Press.

Your writer will never acquire enough professionalism to cease to be amazed that he has lasted so long at this project. Some of the fuel for his endurance has been reader response; some good, some...not so good.

Among that response has been a singularly perplexing and irritating comment that goes something like, "You really told these people." Your writer feels led to expound on that a bit, and to do so he will (1) drop the affected editorial "we", (2) offer a few personal revelations, and (3) launch into his all-too-frequent didacticism.

I am one of "These People."

I was delivered by the colorful country doctor, E. W. Crockett, at my great-grandfather's home in rural south McClenny ("when" is none of your business) as a sixth generation Baker Countian, a ninth generation Floridian, and a 12th generation American. I had no known ancestors to arrive on these shores after the Revolution, and none were known to have been citizens of any colony or state above the Mason-Dixon Line. Most were Teutonic and Gaelic.

There cannot be more valid credentials for a Cracker than these. But this background and beginning did not make me more of a Baker Countian than any other resident, by nativity or adoption. But let there be no mistake; I am one of what some of you refer to as "these people"

My ancestors fought in every war participated in by this nation except those with Mexico and Spain. Among my forebears were clergymen of the Church of England; one of the first doctors in the colonies; a personal representative of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell; a legislator and horticulturist of note; and a prime supplier of foodstuffs to the Confederate Army.

But, alas, I cannot claim credit for anything that happened before the day I was born. And none of these people make me more of or a better Baker Countian or American. Lest I present my background as being too lily white, let me add that my ethnic ancestry includes some Mediterranean and Semitic groups, Amerindians, and a few hints of; the Heaven only knows what sort.

There were those in my ancestry who sided with the Tories during the Revolution. Some of the men in my background disapproved of the dissolution of the Union and sat out the Civil War in hiding. as deserters and dissenters.

All of my Baker County forebears arrived in this county area after somebody else. They were among the very earliest and also among the last, but, none were first.

None of which makes me any less a Baker Countian or contributed to my being an "outsider", a term as offensive to me as "these people."

I had an ancestor who is reputed to have gambreled an Indian and flayed him alive; another who single handedly rustled one hundred head of cattle in one night; one who owned sixty six human beings as slaves and who regularly whipped his boss slave for infractions before they were committed; and a woman who gave her baby to a passing stranger. There were those who fought with their fists to the death, stole corn from widows, made and drank illegal shine, and one who was captured three times during the Revolutionary War by the British and was refused exchange by the Continental Congress after his forth capture.

I am pleased that I cannot be legitimately blamed for any incidents that happened before the day of my birth. And none of these people made me any less a Baker Countian and American.

I first heard a regional slur when l was fifteen after the first ten minutes of my first period class of the first day I attended a northern school. The band director said, "We'll play 'The American Suite', but we're going to leave out 'Dixie'. Those people are so stupid they don't deserve to be called Americans." I've been rather sensitive to such remarks since.

Most intelligent people are good-naturedly tolerant of rib-poking about hick towns, city slickers, Southern accents, and Yankee twangs, but some of the diatribes I've been hearing for the past fifteen years are veritable spouts of poison.

Innocent sounding, even bearing the earmarks of keen perception, is this often heard comment: "Just look around in this meeting. How many county people do you see here? We're all outsiders. That's what's wrong .with this county."

I believe that observation is sadly simplistic, off target, and closely kin to the truth in ways not realized by those who uttered it.

On the one hand, you have a large segment of the county population only one generation away from hunger. They don't have time for your meetings; they're out enjoying the first prosperity they've ever known (much like your ancestors did when they made the transition from hunger to prosperity). On the other hand, you find a continuing small thread and core of natives who have tried to urge and lead the others along, but the leaders are no more. We must raise up a new crop of leaders, and we probably won't see them until our society has settled down onto a plateau following our new found prosperity (don't let media scare you about hard times; the public is spending harder and faster than ever on what they've always dreamed about).

Baker County is at another of her transition periods; this time from rural communities to cultural and intellectual pursuits and possibly to her first true and lasting economy boost. She won't get across the threshold with a people divided and polarized.
After the Revolutionary Boy had cast the die of independence, Ben Franklin sagely remarked, "We must all hang together or we shall all hang separately." l think I can safely borrow from the old philosopher to say that if we are to achieve success in any of our ventures in this county (downtown re-development, Chamber of Commerce, arts fests, historical preservation, continued educational upgrading, and improved living conditions for all citizens), we must all hang in there together as Baker Countians or we shall surely hang separately as "outsiders" and "these people."

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, July 9, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Reminiscing at the Beaches
As your columnist is seasonally wont to do, he is taking the sun and salt air on the strand. It is a sweet respite he sometimes sorely needs this escape to our primeval aquatic existence.
Your writer has had a long association and love affair with the Jacksonville Beaches. It was on the Boardwalk during World War II that he was introduced to hotdogs-on-a-stick (now called "corndogs"...degenerate relabelling) and frosted malteds (since renamed "soft-serve ice cream"...yuchh!), and he spent a trillion dollars in the penny arcade. Various relatives lived at the Beaches in the past, and, naturally, he lived with them until he wore out his welcome.
The next time your writer gets rich he's going to buy a place there.
Your columnist's grandfather Barber, indubitably the world's best teller of tales, used to regale his impromptu audiences with stories of annual cattle drives to the seashore for pasturage in the salt marshes. Then, there were the long drives home before the cows "came down with the salt sickness."
He told of panthers roaming the powdery dunes and leaf-canopied hammocks. Once, thinking he had seen a particularly big hog coursing through the sawgrass, he investigated and discovered instead a particularly big panther. Poorly armed with only a revolver but greatly armed with the knowledge of a panther's remarkable abilities of running, leaping, and eating people, he chose to quietly snd quickly retreat.
Some members of one of Baker County's old families - the Alex Williams - early decided to identify themselves with the Beaches. Their successes proved that McClenny's loss was the Beaches' gain.
Taking our coffee after our morning five mile constitutional, and while the wavelets lap at the bulkhead, we are given to reflecting on the similarities between the two communities of the Jacksonville Beaches and McClenny.
"Similarities?" you might well ask. To which we respond with a whole raft of paragraphs on the subject. For instance, the Jacksonville Beaches and McClenny (Pablo Beach and Darbyville, respectively) are about the same in age, and, as noted in the parenthetical comment, experienced name changes. In the past, nobody mindful of his health, would haved lived year round by the seashore, and we have heard woefully often, the plea, "Lord deliver me from ever having to live in McClenny." But look at the two now...busting out at the seams, so to speak.
Both were, at some points in their pasts, believed to be economic Utopias, and both have known economic bad times.
Both the Jacksonville Beachs and McClenny have blighted downtowns, and both have know the frustration and delay of re-development.
Both communities have been blest with more than their share of that hoard who descend on a town and seem to live magically without employment but who, in spite of myriad infirmities, lack of education, and social deprivations, can roll off the names, addressss, and hours of every local, state and federal hand-out agency and program in the area. That still probably would not be beyond toleration, but they just don't do anything with their collective personal appearance to help decorate either place.
Both the Beaches and McClenny are bedroom communities for the city of Jacksonville. Both communities experience an economic problem with many of their Jacksonville commuting residents leaving nothing in their bedroom communities but some taxes and a few dollars spent at convenience stores and fast food chains. But many of the bedroom communities people demand the same, or better, health, emergency, educational, and police care that they used to receive in Jacksonville.
And so the combination of "sorry types who could not care less about the harm they cause to community and the good people who unwittingly and innocently help create a frustrating situation can begin to lose for us good residents and potential good residents. There will be a void. Voids are always filled by something. Let's hope the filler will not be undersirable.
Your writer sees the problems easily, but the answers come a bit slowly.
And as we sip our way through the sundown behind us, and as the last rays of the day illumine the toes on our up-propped feet, we gaze out onto the beach now cleaned by the receding tide. The golden tips of our toes are being transferred to the upper stories of piled-high clouds.
Now dark sets in. A few lights out at sea are answered by kids on the beach with left-over Fourth sparklers. A sweet little ol' lady takes the time to bid us a good evening.
We figure that all we've been thinking about is too weighty for the moment. While we have it made, we're just going to enjoy it and let somebody else tend to these matters.
But isn't this what got our communities into their predicaments in the first place?

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, July 16, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Columns draw readers' ire

Your columnist is not possessed of the facility to stir up a hornets nest even if he sat on one, but sometimes he, just by making known some simple observations, can draw the ire of a reader or two. Seems like our last two effusions did not quite "geelawses" with some folks.

We suppose we shall postpone this week's planned (and right good we thought) bit of nostalgia for some comments on some readers' comments. It would be redundant to review those columns, because if we had a few readers who were unable to understand simply-stated, unambiguous, and fair quality English a couple of weeks ago, we doubt they have had sufficient time and opportunity to have acquired the skills to do any better by now.

In answer to the first received criticism "You're trying to say the troubles of this county are caused by those of us moving in."

We remind our readers that we said nothing of the sort, but were stating that all the ills of the county are not attributable to those born and reared inside Baker County.

This column has for six years reviewed the past and heritage of our county and during that time gently chided the native born (and the almost native born) for their foibles, their frequent lack of self respect attacks, and their all-too-often periods of self-satisfaction. Why, then, would a couple of columns on the backs of our adopted citizens be construed as unfair and over-balanced?

The native born do not, can not, and must not bear the onus of guilt for a county divided and static.

We also state to our critics that it is a prejudice of the most simple minded sort that categorizes people according to the accident of their birth places. In this writer's travels from the banks of the Yukon to the banks of the Danube he has had demonstrated to him most emphatically and dramatically that no region holds a monopoly on ignorance or on intelligence.

One parting shot: this county has been in operation for 120 years. Somebody was minding the store before you came, and the job was being done, not always first-rate but always against overwhelming odds, by a proper and workable coalition of natives and adopted citizens.

There were also a couple of diatribes against our Beaches article (a clever way we thought of slipping in a jibe or two at community disinterest). One gentleman asked, "You think you got all the answers, don't you?" We thought paragraph 14 had been lucid enough on that. Another fellow sneered, "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

We hesitate to lend dignity to the latter terribly original question by answering it. We fear that the puerile equating intelligence with amounts of dollars in one's possession is, but not restricted to, sadly overworked Baker County thinking.

Using the premise that intelligence cannot be deposited in the bank or invested in the money market, we ask: If you're so smart how come there are no recreational parks named in your honor as the donor? Where are the children's wings of the hospitals with your name on them? Why aren't there libraries, an art gallery, history museums in our county named for you? No boulevards renamed for you due to your generosity? Didn't you know that in addition to mountain and lake homes, trips to Vegas, and luxury cars, money also buys honor, memorials, and respectability?

In other words, it's now time for those of you who have made your money here in this community to return it in the form of investments which will never bring much back to you in the form of cash.

Have you ever thought of lowering your rents on your downtown business buildings, taking a sacrifice in order to salvage the downtown? It's unbusinesslike, of course, but why not try lending out to beginning entrepreneurs at interest lower than the going rate to help them get started. You made yours by being prudent, so you're not going to invest in a loser.

Consumers, shop at home, and keep the money stirring in the county. And, shopkeepers, give your potential customers a reason to shop at home by not charging them extra for the privilege of doing so.

No, critics, this column doesn't have the answers, but we cannot understand why those who equate smartness with money haven't understood that the more money moving about for everybody means more money for everybody. And we have difficulty understanding why they haven't gotten together and pulled their county out of the economic slump.

And to our final critic, yes, we shall get back to reporting history.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, July 23, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
Post offices in Glen St. Mary
Mr. Robert Robinson, former postmaster of Glen Saint Mary, is an accomplished researcher in history and genealogy, and he sent us the archival material upon which most of this column is based.
Glen Saint Mary was less than two years old when an application for a post office was accepted by the United States Post Office Department. D. Lansing Skinner, late of Michigan, was the applicant and, as of 3 February, 1883, the community's first post master. Mr. Skinner made out his form on 12 January, 1883, (one cannot accuse any federal agency of acting that quickly today).
In large print the application insisted that the name of the proposed post office, when written, would not resemble that of any other post office in the United States.
The site description of the Glen facility was in the southwest quarter of section 36, township 2 south, range 21 east in Baker County, Florida, directly on the route from Jacksonville to Tallahassee.
Mr. Skinner said that mail is carried on the stated route seven times a week and that delivery to Glen would not increase the travel of mail one way each trip. The railroad Was named the Florida Central and Western.
The nearest post office on the same route was Darbyville three miles east. Sanderaon was six miles west.
In answer to a question about nearby streams Mr. Skinner said that the Saint Mary's River was six miles north and the Little Saint Mary's was three quarters of a mile east.
His post office building stood on the north side of the track near, or in, the station (the answer is ambiquous). Mr. Skinner answered, "stop here", to the question of the distance from his facility to the nearest station where mail is regularly dropped by the train.
C.B. McClenny, Darbville's postmaster, attested and affirmed it all.
Glen's population was given as three hundred: Penciled on the margin was, "Answer carefully and return with a petition of citizens." What wouldn't your columnist give for a copy of that petition while Glen's centennial is upon us.
An accompanying map shows the road from Darbyville to Sanderson making a high curve up by the old defunct Barbers' Station, down to just north of Glen, and then in a low erratic curve northward to the old Margaretta (Gurganus) and Drake Plantations, and finally to Sanderson.
From Glen a road (the remainder of the Jacksonville-Tallahassee route) led north westerly toward old Johnsville-Taylor Plantation. South of Glen, the route branched west into and around the Glen Nursery and then due south to Johnstown (not to be confused with afore-mentioned Johnsville in Baker County above Taylor). After the southerly route crossed the Little Saint Mary's river at Manntown, it forked one route going toward Maxville and Highland and the other toward Johnstown.
Shortly after (22 September, 1883), Miss Theresa M. Tilton (reputed to be the first resident of Glen and was the owner of Glen's first hotel) was appointed postmaster. She was reappointed four years later as Mrs. Theresa M. Cole.
Henry H. Slayton was postmaster from 1889 to 1896. James A. Daniel received the appointment in '98, George M. Weeks in 1900, and Samuel Bass in 1909.
Mr. Bass filled out a form in 1915 supplying the following information: the nearest river was the Little Saint Mary's, the nearest creek was Powers, (Kirkland) Branch one mile north, the nearest post office on his route was Macclenny 2 1/2 miles east, and the nearest west was Sanderson, and the closest post office not on his route was Sapp, Florida, 10 miles southeast.
Sam Bass' store housed the post office and was 75 yards south of the track. It stood a little south of the present Franklin house and store building on the corner of south 125 and the railroad.
Jesse Earl Franklin was appointed 1 October, 1919, and remained in that position for about 40 years, hauling persimmons to the fall markets, keeping the minutes of the Glen Baptist Church, and accumulating rental property within the town.
Mr. Frankiln described his post office as being 250 feet southwest of the Seaboard Airline station and one block south of the nearest United States highway. He informed his superiors that he received mail by rail and rural route from all parts of the United States and some foreign countries.
The Franklin store and post office remained in operation (the store with limited inventory) until the end of the fifties decade when a new facility was built on US 90, Mary Chesser Hurst (now Rhoden) post master.
The old rambling two story white frame structure that housed the Franklin store and post office for so many years will live again during the Glen Centennial Celebration, September 24 through 27, as a museum.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, July 30, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The demise of the front porch - Part One

After the Fourth of July, summer always seemed to be nothing more than a languid interlude to be tolerated until the final big doings of Labor Day.
Afternoon trips to swimming holes and an occasional late watermelon were cooling respites. Another simple pleasure, under-rated and now almost forgotten, was to pass the doldrums season sitting on the porch watching the world drag sweatily by.

Most houses of olden times in America had at least one porch. Some of even the most modest sported two. Some not considered elaborate at all had three-front, back, and side. And many fine homes were possessed of wrap-around porches on both, or more, floors.

Hotels in the South would as soon have omitted the clerk's desk as the porch. Even business establishments offered porches for their patrons' comfort.

Porches were not restricted to America, but they were practically an American institution.

In middle class and low income America, the gentlemen retired to the front porch after supper in lieu of spending time with their cigars in the drawing room. More business and political transactions were probably made on front porches in Victorian and early twentieth century America than in offices.

Speeches were made from front porches of homes and stores, and it is only a generation since Baker Countians heard their Democratic Rallies emanating from store porches.

Assassinations on porches were so frequent in some parts of early America as to almost be commonplace. In Baker County almost a score of the unfortunate fatal incidents can be counted with ease, if not comfort.

The porch was utilized for making home-made ice cream, the super sweet, icy kind that was full of fresh peaches, real vanilla, or expensive canned pineapple. It was served, in non-matching bowls and dishes and gave gluttonous kids headaches from eating too fast.

There was always the irritating soul who spent a great deal of time banging a spoon into the bowl to soften the frozen delicacy. It was always somebody like an aged, widowed great-aunt who couldn't be reprimanded, and we kids wondered why the trouble of cranking that dern churn if Auntie so-and-so was going to beat her ice cream to death to melt it down again.

Pinder bilin's are unequivocally among America's great contributions to the world's gastronomic and social Halls of Fame,(you say you don't know about "pinder billn's"?). Pinders refused to be ready for scratching until the hottest, most sultry days of summer.) Every grain of sand encountered tenaciously clung to sweaty arms, neck, back, etc. But the heat, discomfort, washing, and watching the backyard washpot fire were soon forgotten amidst the absolute orgy of overeating when pans of the steaming, salty succulent legumes were passed around.

"What are pinders?" you ask again. Well, in the throes of the following night and day's bellyaches, one couldn't care less that pinders are called by less enlightened persons, "peanuts."

Sitting on the front porch was an open invitation for passers-by to stop in and sit for a spell. Strangers were invited to step back to the rear porch and refresh themselves at the watershelf.

Screened in east and north porches were called "sleeping porches" and were appreciated on still hot nights. It meant that all bedding had to be aired in the sun the next day, but it was worth it.

And on a rainy night, sleeping under a tin roof on the side porch was closely kin to residency in heaven itself.

Fastidious Cracker mothers never allowed any sleeping on the porches but the family. The dog might be permitted under the steps, and the cat often chose a secret but breezy spot behind the potted fern. The Cracker father joined them after dinner (dinner to Crackers was, as it was to old time Continentals, the noon meal) on the edge of the porch for his hour nap.

In the country and often in the suburbs before the zoning laws sent them out, there were the chickens, always unwanted on the porch. They left their calling cards, so to speak, and that called for a pan of water, a broom, lots of shoo-ing, and an occasional ugly word.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, August 6, 1981
THE WAY WAS-Gene Barber
The demise of the front porch - Conclusion

Furniture and paraphernalia on porches were predictable. On the front porch were rockers (turned upside down and leaned against the wall to keep dogs off when the family was away or retired for the night); a glider or swing (or both); touch-me-nots, Boston and asparagus ferns, wandering jew, and coleus in reclaimed graniteware pots and slop jars; a flyswatter stuck in the groove of the novelty siding and behind a window facing; a switch over the door for bad kids; and a fan or two, compliments of a funeral home or insurance company, sharing the window facing depository.

Back porches for the reasons that they were more utilitarian than for leisure were usually furnished with straight (or stool) chairs and benches rather than rockers. The switch, fans, and flyswatter were also standard on the back porch.

A watershelf, complete with bucket (its type depended on how rich the family was), graniteware or gourd dipper (don't let anybody kid you; gourd dippers made the water taste funny), basin (remember the mandatory feet washing before bedtime?), and ugly misshapened bar of soap; a cracked and wavy mirror on the wall; a community comb tucked in with the keen switch; and sack towel on a peg complemented the furnishings on the back porch.

But since the back porch didn't pass as soon as its front counterpart, we shall leave it and review the reasons for the demise of the front porch.

Until the post war boom and regular employment of the fifties, most Baker County homes (in fact, 95 percent plus) were of the cabin-shanty or shotgun types with a scattering of double pens left over from the nineteenth century. All had front porches except those which had finally fallen off from age and neglect.

Then out of better houses and snazzier gardens came the brilliant idea to convert porches into sun porches, Florida rooms (whatever the heck that means), TV rooms (we're always building rooms to house that hypnotic Cyclops, but he always winds up in our living and dining rooms), and "that extra space for today's modern family." Next, the same power companies and cooling manufacturers who are now waging: a campaign via the news media to get us to cut down on energy use, easily convinced us that the American people deserved more comfort. within a few summers nobody but a few die-hards sat on porches (by-the-way, this writer would as soon the power companies save the expensive energy savings campaign and apply the savings to his electric bill).

Then, there was the increase in crime. People threw up their hands declaring that to sit on one's front porch was to take one's life into one's own hands. Many of these same self-styled frightened folk think nothing of taking off jogging alone on empty stretches or going weekly to some of Jacksonville's big centers of shopping, purse-snatching and rape.

We entered the wild-eyed "let's build a house" fad ($500.00 a month payments make it a fad that one can't shake loose). Plans for split-levels, entertainment centers, solariums, saunas) etc. left no room or cash for porches. Besides, the home designers (they used to be house plans drawers) informed us that porches were unnecessary .and tacky, and a real gaucherie.

Two of our most effective family social and learning centers were the fireplace and the front porch. There we learned stories of our family, cultivated a sense of humor, sharpened our folk lore, and just remained closer.

The Arabs drove us back in the beauty of the fireplace. Maybe they will now send us down to the local building supply for a load of. porch-constructing material.

Since we began putting this column together last summer we have been seeing more folks moving back out onto the front porch. If this signals the revival of the porch, it could be the greatest thing to happen to America since peanut butter.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, August 13, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
The Okefenokee Swamp
Part one
Stretching northward from upper Baker County into the counties of Charlton, Pierce, Ware, and Clinch is 600 square miles of another world. In the past some called it simply "the Swamp", the Big Swamp", or "the Big Water." The Creeks knew it as "the Terrible Land", "Land of the Trembling Earth", and Living Ground." Some historians present compelling evidence that Spanish and French explorers knew of the swamp prior to 1600 and called it on their maps "the Lake of The Apalachee." Since 1763 there have been found in excess of 90 variations of the now standardized name "Okefenokee."
In 1539 Hernando de Soto and 600 men with horses and swine marched northward through the peninsula into a swamp so immense they spoke of it afterwards with wonder and superlatives. It is now orthodox history that the morass his chroniclers wrote of was the wide swamp of the Withlacoochee River, completely ignoring the travel times, directions, and land descriptions involved and recorded (but settled orthodox historians are good about things like that).
A Spanish map of 1542 shows the swamp surrounded by forts. Tales were taken back to the Spanish court of giants who protected the unique watery country, and, in fact, the late Tom Chesser of Charlton County reported viewing seven-foot, plus, human remains uncovered by a team of University of Georgia archaeologists (Mr. Chesser, acting as guide, agreed to permit the burial mound investigation on his land only if the skeletons were undisturbed and carefully recovered).
Some researchers have suggested that Narvaez also visited the edge of the great swamp as early as 1528 but refused to enter. Le Moyne, the map-maker and artist who resided for a time at nearby Fort Caroline included a "Lacus Aquae dulce" on his 1591 map of the territory that corresponds with the Okefenokee, and many historians once believed that his data came from the Narvaez expedition narratives.
The surveyor De Brahm, in his British Majesty's service in the mid 1700's, described the swamp as famous and renowned, and therefore probably based his adjectives on well-circulated knowledge of the Okefenokee. He also mentioned that the race inside the Okefenokee could not be subdued by the Spaniards or other Indians.
Other years the great swamp was mentioned in documents or drawn on maps were 1582, 1675, and 1752. It was at this time that a recognizable form of the present name was used, and since 1763, well, we refer you back to paragraph one.
Many Florida and Georgia historians refused to accept that the Okefenokee was known to Anglo-Americans until the mid eighteenth century but have no difficulty believing that Moore of South Carolina on his slaving expeditions among the Apalachee and Timaqua Indians skirted both sides of the swamp. The principal trails and paths he used laid in close proximity to the Okefenokee. Governor Moore had to know something about the swamp in the early years of the 1700's.
It was the English who, soon after their settlement of the Georgia coast in the 1730's, visited the swamp and began to name the features they found there. The low floating islands they called "batteries" (resembling the low hunting boats popular with the English). The large high land areas became "Islands", and the smaller hammocks were known as "houses".
Since 1763 the Okefenokee with one of its name variations was found on every map of any consequence. Bartram wrote of the swamp using some of the appellations from antiquity "Lacus"and "Marais."
Around 1744 Traders Hill was established, complete with fortifications against the Spanish and newly arriving Seminoles from the Creek tribes to the west. With Traders Hill (near the present Folkston) came the Cracker element and our first no-nonsense knowlededge of the Okefenokee.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, August 20, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
The Okefenokee Swamp
Part two
Last week, we mentioned that the English traders and settlers named the low floating Islands of the Okefenokee "batteries" because they resembled their low hunting boats, but we neglected to further inform our readers that the name for these low hunting boats was "bateau." The same boat, in design if not in materials of construction, was used by the last resident of the swamp as late as 1958 and was still called a "bateau."
The people of the swamp have been varied and have evidently been in that rich area since it was first habitable. Historians and cartographers of antiquity are in disagreement whether the earliest to have contact with European discoverers were Timuqua, Apalachee, or Guale Indians (there seemed to be little difference between the three).
Some anthropologists believe that there was a definite language and cultural link between the three major peoples - Timuqua, Apalachee, and Guale and some of the people of Central America, especially of the Yucatan Peninsula. In addition, it is now accepted that there was a similar link between these people and the great mound builders whose residence stretched from upper Georgia through the Ohio valley. In other words, the Okefenoke people were part of the poor relatives of one of the most advanced cultures in the Americas.
It was apparently only rumors and fabricated tales that any of the ancient people ramained within the fastness of Okefenokee when Col. Moore of South Carolina killed and enslaved what was left after the Spaniards' benevolent enslaving and partial eradication in the name of God. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, William Bartram (regarded as a sacred cow by most historians, but much of his writing is considered not worth a diddly by this writer) promulgated the story with his "daughters of the sun" story.
Tha Yamasees, probably related to the aforementioned English writings as being situated along the maritime provinces of Georgia and Florida. The Spanish claimed had been neighbors of St. Augustine in the mid 1600's and had retreated to Georgia after a disagreement between the two. The Yamasees said that they teamed up with Moore in the early 1700's to help extirpate the remaining Timuqua and wound up in the Baker County and Okefenokee area as a scattered group. They were pushed into the great swamp during the first Seminole war and later joined their kinsmen, the Creeks and Seminoles, in their struggle against the white settlers.
Just interior of and scattered among the Yamasees were the Uchees. Thought to have lived originally in upper east Georgia, the Uchees were a particularly dark people and fierce beyond description. One of their last survivors, Uchae Billy, was killed during the Second Seminole War in east-central Florida.
Billy claimed he was from the Okefenokee, and two historians of note gave the Uchees residence as being along the St. Mary's River. One, John Filson, was more specific in 1793 with the sites of the fork of the St. Mary's and the head of the St. Johns River (this was the Little St. Johns which later became corrupted into Suwannee). If Filson was correct, the Okefenokee was home also to Uchees as well as Yamasecs.
A number of historians, contemporary writers, and even the contemporary Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins stated that the Shawnees also lived in or near the Okefenokee. It was not unusual for Indian tribes to move hundreds, even a thousand miles, in the old days. An old Shawnee from Ohio swore that he had been born on the Suwannee River near the sea and he was able to describe the area before he returned there in the early 1800's (it might be wise to mention here that in spite of the books and movies to the contrary, Indians are human and will also lie).
During and after the Creek and Seminole Wars of the teens decade of the nineteenth century, the Okefenokee received a new flow of Indian settlers including a group of wandering rather primitive Cowetas. The Cowetas were generally disliked by everbody, including their Creek kinsmen. They proved to vexatious to their Indian and white neighbors around the swamp by stealing horses and anything else they could get their hands on.
The Cowetas are listed in a report in 1828 as camping south of the Okefenokee, and they are the only Indians by name this writer has heard of in local traditional tales. Although all Indians were supposed to have been removed from the Okefenokee by the end of the Second Seminole War (some historians say they were gone by 1838... bull-ony), the writer's Chesser and Hicks ancestors spoke of Indians, Cowetas by name, in the area as late as 1876.
The writer's grandfather Snide Chesser told of being taken into the swamp by his Indian babysitters, and his sister, the late Molly Crews, could speak an Indian tongue. The writer accepts this as authentic not because they were relatives but because ot their lack of education and knowledge they could not have manufactured so convincing a tale or invented an Indian language.
This writer is convinced that the last Indian inhabitants of the Okefenokee were the Coweta branch of the Creek Indians. And when the last of them drifted out of the swamp via Trail Ridge and were last seen disappearing into the rising sun on the railroad, Ol' Okefenokee had seen the end of a residency of a race who had known its beauty and security for perhaps 10,000 years.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, August 27, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Okefenokee Swamp - Part Three

For one who has been desperately trying for years to write a history of this county, the lack of historical writing heretofore on the subject has been nothing less than appalling (it would be more correct to say that we have been both writing and re-writing because of the loss of our first manuscript due to vandalism; a subject we are certain our readers have long tired of but which still seems to frequently and inconveniently crop up in our craw, especially, when the book's delay is still considered to be the fault of the writer).

However, we have been amazed throughout the past couple of years to discover that there lies in dusty tomes, manuscripts, and records proof that the sands and swamps of Baker County have ..been tread by Europeans and Americans for a known two and a Quarter centuries and very likely for perhaps as much as two hundred years beyond that.

In a fascinating book by Albert Hazen Wright on the subject of the Georgia-Florida Frontier- The Okefenokee Swamp Its History and Cartography Volume I we have found leads to little known maps and writings long ignored by modern historians which, ,when. weighed by our first hand knowledge of the swamp and its environs and from traditional tales by the old-timers and their ancestors, have been useful in the extreme.

This book is, as are most of the older effusions on the subjects of the big swamp, and southeast Georgia, considered among the rarest of the, rare. We strongly recommend. it to anyone interested in the history of this area. We decline to give credit to our lender to protect him from having to be bothered from borrowers who might not return it. The P.K. Young Library of Florida History. at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and some of the largest libraries in our neighboring state of Georgia presumably have copies.

But back to our narrative, continuing from last week, the swamp was often visited by both white and Creek hunters in the last half of the 1700's. Almost all the writers and cartographers who treated the southeast United States and Florida referred to the Okefenokee as renowned and celebrated. Most of them held that the Saint Mary's River emerged from the swamp and many of them correctly depicted the Great Bend of the Saint Mary's and included most or all of its prongs (usually called "branches" in those days). Bear in mind that these map-makers and geographers were, correctly or near correctly telling the world about the present Baker County and its environs before and during the American Revolutionary War, a time when many modern historians prefer to believe that our area was untrodden by any but a few transient Indians.

The present Moccasin Branch was known in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as "Alligator Branch" (or "Creek"). Hog Pen Branch was "Ellicott's Creek" (for the man who surveyed and established the international boundary between ,the United States and Spanish Florida.) Ellicott's Mound was represented sometimes as being "Mound A" and "Mound B", with "A" at the junction of Cedar Creek with the Big River.

The Moniac section was "Hogan's Bridge" (or "Ferry") in, the 1840's and 1850's. In,1814,. however, the same .was called "Pine Log Crossing Place", and before that, "Elilicott's Monumeet."

Several of the maps showed the Okefenokee extending far in to Florida and the several Baker County topographical features mentioned above as being part of the great swamp.

In 1823, Charles Vignoles mentioned a few sawmills in operation on the upper branches of theSaint Mary's River when he treated .the Okefenokee region. Charles Darby wrote in 1821 that Trail Ridge rose in the Okefenokee and extended south for an unknown distance and that its hillocks were unwooded and destitute of water.

Dr. William Baldwin, stationed in Saint Mary's, Georgia, and who was a celebrated botanist of his day, wrote in 1814 that he had come within 12 miles of the head of the Saint Mary's River and the Okefenokee Swamp and had found a country vastly more rich in plants than on the seacoast of Florida and Georgia.

Hardly had the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States begun when the U.S. started surveying out a cross-peninsula canal (ancestor of the one still lying dormant amidst controversy and descendent of one spoken of in George Washington's. administration). The Canal Commissioners thought the Okefenokee and the Saint Mary's River could be used for the purpose. In 1818 near the junction of Cedar Creek with the, main Saint Mary's, an atlas placed "Commissioner's Encampment.". Historically the Okefenokee and Baker County are one, and we could continue for pages with these intriguing bits of intertwining data. We shall instead leave this subject and introduce our readers to some very interesting characters when we return next week.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, September 3, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
The Okefenokee
It seems quite proper that an unusual geographical feature would attract unusual and interesting people. It has been home and host to the very worst and the very best, the bravest and the most foolish.
Some like the Seagrove brothers have received little publicity because they were not of the swashbuckling type. James (called "Diego" by the Spanish) Seagrove (sometimes written "Seagroves") was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs by none other than George Washington himself. He operated his agency out of Saint Mary's, Colerain, and Traders Hill in the 1790's, and included descriptions and mentions of the Okefenokee in much of his reports and correspondence.
Robert Seagrove was a storekeeper at Traders Hill and was the recognized Indian trader for the lower Creeks of western Georgia and of the central Georgia Seminoles. In spite of the Spaniards' attempts to the contrary, he was also much used by the Florida Seminoles. Robert hunted often in the swamp as did the Creeks and Seminoles after game began to be scarce throughout southern Georgia.
Lake Seagrove (sometimes written "Sego") within the Okefenokee was named for James. Some local historians argue (and they have a qood point) that the lake was the namesake of Robert, who lived and operated at the swamp's edge much longer than his brother was Indian agent.
There is an historical rumor that Alexander McGillvray, the extraordinary and brilliant supreme chief of the Creek Indians, was a frequent visitor to the swamp, but if that were true the fact shoud be easy to find among the voluminous writings of the man.
A claimant of McGillvray's position was Willam Augustus Bowles, exceptionally intelligent and resourceful international rascal. Writer Albert Hazen Wright mentions, but does not suggest or propose, that Billy's Island and Billy's Lake in the Okefenokee might be named for Bowles. This self-styled "President of the State of Muscogee" - Bowles - was a prolific letter writer, and nowhere in his writings does he speak of the Okefenokee.
The third of the famous triumvirate who were supposed to have been closely identified with the Okefenokee was the international renegade Danial McGirth. He owed his allegiance to no flag and conducted his brigandage from a fortified headquarters some believe was at or near Brandy Branch community (attested to by Elias Hicks, c. 1775 - c. 1814, an ancestor of several Baker Countians).
Of the three, this infamous character was the most probable candidate for a swamp person, but we have yet to uncover evidence that McGirth was familiar with any but the lower perimeter of the Okefenokee. Among the influential Indian traders around and in the swamp was Jack Kennard, a rich Scots half breed. He was described by his contemporaries as despotic illiterate, conniving, and of being possessed of consumate abilities in dealing with the Creeks and Seminoles and the Spanish. Although his residence and post was on the Flint River far to the west, his business so frequently took him to the Traders Hill-Colerain-Saint Mary's area that the route skirting the northern edge of the Okefenokee (previously an Indian path) became known as Kennard's Trading path.
Kennard often dipped into the swamp for a hunting expedition, and it was rumored that he sometimes invited stumbling blocks and enemies along these hunts and returned without them - left for gator snacks.
Timothy and William Barnard (brothers?) were important members of the Creek nation who visited the Okefenokee on their autumnal hunts. Timothy was a valuable liaison man between the Indians and the U.S. and William, it is said, settled among the white settlers near the eastern edge of the swamp. We don't know if the Barnards were Indians, whites, or mixed. And we don't know if there is any significance that the original Wilson "Willis" Conner who preached in Camden County, and Spanish Florida, and was a high ranking official of the short-lived "Republic of Alachua" in Florida named one of his sons "William Barnard."
Benjamin Hawkins, another appointee of President Washington's to the Indian affairs of the Southeast, was a visitor to the swamp pursuing an end to problems among the Creeks as stirred up by the disreputible intrigant John Galphin. The two men were diametrically opposite in their morals and ethics. Hawkins was often unjustly criticized for attempting to deal fairly with the Indians. Galphin, it was said by some of his contemporaries, was the most double-dealing son-of-a-gun to ever walk the Georgia soil.
Next week, some famous Indians of the swamp and several white hunters of note who became as one with the old Okefenokee.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, September 10, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
NOTE: No article this week

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, September 17, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Rufus Powers grew Up with Glen

(Writer's note: once again, allow us to divert from the "Okefenokee" series. The Article this week is being substituted because of the upcoming Glen St. Mary Centennial. The "Okefenokee" will return.

One of the popular features of The Press issue of April 1, 1976, was the Bi-Centennial series column on the Powers Pioneers. The accompanying photograph was of a stately pecan tree and a sprightly gentleman named Rufus Powers. The pecan tree, already old in 1975, will be among the five Glen historical landmarks interpreted by local artists and reproduced for sale by the Glen Centennial Commission and the County Fine Arts Council during the upcoming Celebration.

The gentleman, Rufus Powers, was the subject of a glowing tribute by his step daughter Dorothy Bradley of the south Sanderson Section. We think the readers will enjoy the abstracted version that follows.

"Drive one mile north of Glen Saint Mary on State Road 125 to where the road goes gently down a hill, and look for the large old pecan tree, now once again laden with pecans...and let me tell you of the man who was born on that 160 acre farm in the year 1883 when Glen Saint Mary was in its second year as a town...

"Mr. Rufus Powers, Glen Saint Mary's oldest and longest living native, to this writer's knowledge, was born on March 3, 1883. He became my step-father in 1932 and remained so until his death on February 22, 1979 at the age of 96. He left us a legacy of memories and a wealth of information as to the early years of his growing up in Glen...

"Mr. Rufus' father was James Hamilton Powers, born in 1842 in Appling County, Georgia. He fought in the Civil War and was taken prisoner at Newport News, Virginia. He married Nancy Tomlinson of Nassau County Florida...He had a 412 acre land grant on the north side of the Saint Mary's River. He either sold it or traded it and moved to what they called the "Flat Place" farther north.

Then he moved to Duval County and had a place on McGirt's Creek. The oak runners whipped him and he came over this way hunting a place to live. Somebody told him about a fellow named Mott who had a homestead he wanted to get rid of. Mr. Mott had what was called "proved up" land (cleared and a house built on it). This meant he had a right to 160 acres from the Government Homestead Act. Mr. Mott sold it to Mr. Powers for $400.00 .

"He moved there in 1875 with his wife and three sons, Jim, Alex, and Levin. The house they lived in was the same house we lived in for 10 years until my parents built a new one. Sons, Richard, Noah, Monroe, and Rubin, and daughter Sarah were next to be born on this farm. Sarah died at 4 years of age. Monroe also died at 11 years of age...When Mr. Rufus was 3 years old Pencie Elizabeth was born.

"James Hamilton Powers died in 1897 from Bright's Disease. Nancy died in 1915 in a flu epidemic which also claimed Rubin and Pencie Elizabeth. There is a family cemetery established between 1875 and 1883, just east of the house where nine members of the family are buried...The last buried there was Jim, the oldest son, in 1940.

"The neighbors around Mr. Rufus' neighborhood were the Jacksons and the Stricklands to the south and the Alexanders one mile west on what we called the Will White place...What we know as the Neil Kirkland place, to Mr. Rufus was the Mitch Thomas place...The Franklins lived on what we know as the Jimmy Burnsed place one mile to the north, and the Townsends' home was built about a mile north-northeast of the Franklins'...

The road to Glen was directly east of the house in those days, so the pecan tree was in the Powers' backyard. Mr. Rufus walked to school in Glen with Mr. Earl Franklin, who was postmaster in Glen for many years, and with Mr. John Townsend, who was the rural mail carrier in my growing up years. There were no grades in school in those days, just readers. Mr. Rufus finished the 4th and 5th reader.

"Mr. Rufus remembered the stately Mr. George Taber coming to the farm astride a horse to get peach tree stock. At the turn of the century the Glen Nurseries catalog listed the Powers Peach for sale.

"While staying with an uncle who kept a drawbridge over the Amelia River in Fernandina, Mr. Rufus had an accident with a gun which claimed his left leg in 1904 at the age of 21. His uncle asked him to go across the bridge to bring back a marsh pony that was feeding on the other side. He carried a borrowed gun which had a faulty trigger. Coming back across the bridge, his attention was called to where some folks were putting out a gill net. As he turned to where they were, the gun slipped out of his balance and fell, fired, and struck his left leg just above the ankle. For 75 years he had an artificial leg.

"In 1932 he married the mother of the 'Bradley Bunch', and they then had a beautiful dark haired, dark eyed boy named George...

"Mr. Rufus loved Glen Saint Mary, and as is so often the case as one grows older, his conversetion and mind's eye turned to things past. I think in later years he actually saw Glen as it was when he was growing up. He was honored as the county's oldest native son in the Bi-Centennial parade."

Mrs. Davis shared some of Mr. Powers' poetry with The Press, and we would like to present it in its entirety at a later date. But now, we close this offering on Mr. Rufus with an excerpt from his writing: "I've been traveling this road a long, long time. And every step I take forward is a step left behind. But all the steps I've taken forward, and all the steps I've left behind, I thank God I'm strong and healthy and have a pleasant peace of mind."

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, September 24, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
In the spirit of the Centennial
Some notes from a 19th Century newspaper

While researching for some Glen historical notes, we came across this old Sentinel (and, incidentally, we were also flipping through it prior to mailing it back to the lady from whom we had borrowed it more years ago than we wish to remember). Since it was from a day in which the Glen was beginning to enjoy its greatest growth and good reputation, we thought it appropriate to copy some of the news notes and advertisements.

Folks in those days were especially concerned about their physiological functions and ailments (and we thought we were "the age of hypochondria") Those concerned about female intimate commercials on todays TV would really come unglued over some of the almost explicit newspaper ads of Victorian days.

But enough talk about the ads (we're beginning to sound like a Victorian journalist).... read on:

Worth its weight in diamonds

C.A. Willis, editor "The horseman", Chicago, writes: "If my experience is to decide the value of Witch Hazel Oil - the "Pile Ointment" - it is worth its weight in diamonds."

Chamberlaln's Eye and Skin Ointment

A certain cure for Chronic Sore Eyes, Tetter, Salt Rheum, Scald Head, Old Chronic Sores, Fever Sores, Eczema, Itch, Prairie Scratches, Sore Nipples, and Piles. It is cooling and soothing. Hundreds of cases have been cured by it after all other treatmment had failed. It is put up in 25 and 50 cent boxes. For sale by Jones and Bros.

For many years Mr. B. Thompson of Des Moines, Iowa, was severely afflicted with chronic diarrhea. He says: "At times it was very severe, so much so that I feared it would end my life. About seven years ago I chanced to procure a bottle of Chamberlain's Colic, Cholera and Diarrhea Remedy. It gave me prompt relief and I believe cured me permanently, as I now eat or drink anything without harm I please. I have also used it in my family with the best results." For sale by Jones Bros.

Willow baskets, tubs, buckets, and tin ware, lowest market price. Men's black and brown fur and straw hats at lowest prices. Ladies' trimmed and untrimmed hats at lowest prices. Mince meat, per package...10 ???missing.

MY Wife was miserable all the time with kidney complaint, but began improving when she had taken Hood's Sarsaparilla one week, and after taking three bottles was perfectly cured. I had heart failure, catarrh, and liver complaint. Could not sleep, bloated badly, had pains in my back, ringing noises in my ears. Hood's Sarsaparilla gave immediate benefit, sound sleep, and good health. Available at Barber and Rowe General Merchandise, Glen St. Mary.

Personal (Sept. 7, 1882, from the Macclenny Sentinel)

Will Williams and bride have gone to housekeeping at the Glen.

Sheriff Gurganus made a short trip to Jacksonville on business last week.

Geo. L. Taber, of the Glen, was over here Monday a.m. (that means after mules).

Geo. L. Taber, of the Glen, was a passenger toward home by rail Thursday morning.

S.F. Blair has moved his family from the Glen to the house on Macclenny Avenue just east of Fourth Street.

The Times Union tells us that F.J. Pons went to New Orleans Sunday to see the fight between Sullivan and Corbett which takes place today.

W.L. Horne has become sole proprietor of the mill at the Glen, M.D. Barber having sold out his interest.

Another bad rain last night. You can wash your feet in the Little St. Marys while sitting on the trestle.

The Macclenny circulating library will open Monday afternoons from 4 to 6 o'clock, Thursday mornings from 8:30 to 10:00 o'clock, in the old post office.

ONE ENJOYS both the method and results when Syrup of Figs is taken. It acts gently yet promptly on the kidneys, liver and bowels. Cleanses the system effectually, dispels colcis, headaches and fevers, and cures habitual constipation. Do not accept any substitute. Available in 50' and $l bottles at Dr. E.W. Crockett's Drug Store Glen St. Mary.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, October 1, 1981 Page Two
THE WAY IT WAS - Gene Barber
The Glen Centennial
Appraisal and appreciation
When the folks over in the Glen decided to pitch a Centennial Celebration, your writer hailed it as a laudable move. Little did he realize then that he would wind up so intimately identified with it. From his vantage point he was privy to a view not seen by our thousands of celebrants - the labor, imagination, coordination, and anxiety of a dedicated group of workers who went beyond, above, longer, and deeper than duty and obligation. We witnessed the cooperation, toleration, and even indulgence of the Town Council, townspeople, and a marvelous set of merchants.
We received the trust, advice, and financial assistance of individuals, businesses, and organizations from throughout the county and from without the county.
It would be dangerous to single out anyone for recognition, but all our workers concur that one young lady - Mrs. Alice Williams was the moving spirit and the most moving (in the literal sense) member of the Commission. Mrs. Williams chaired several committees and was the single-member and chair of still more.
In the intoxication of success we could tend to ignore and forget we had problems. They were there, but none were unconquerable. The largest and most consistent problems were old-time Baker County procrastination and negativism. We know these are not unique drawbacks to us alone, but we wish they had not been with us; we could have operated much more smoothly and would have operated under much less strain.
We made some mistakes, but since the vast majority of celebrants seemed to not notice or care, we shall let them lie, bringing them out of the closet only when we feel it necessary to aid other planners of like celebrations in avoiding like problems and mistakes.
On the positive side (the much, much greater side), our out-of-town guests acclaimed the parade as the best of its kind they had seen. The foods were pronounced excellent, novel, fitting the occasion, and complemented with prompt and courteous service. The food concessioners ended the day exhausted and broadly smiling as they toted their empty trays and bulging cashboxes home.
Arts and crafts sold well, but more important, they were accepted, viewed, and re-visited. The town decorations were so admired that most went missing before we had an opportunity to take them down. Sunday's music was admired by all, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rising up through the giant pines at sunset revived many a spirit.
Of the street dances, one cosmopolitan gentleman (not at all a fan of country music) stated, "I've never seen so many people having so great a time and not becoming rowdy or creating embarrassing situations." Music and entertainment director Teresa Dance kept the celebrants' high on the natural stimulant of good music,- well-planned and programmed. She did not only an outstanding job, but she could be credited with doing an almost impossible job.
Most agreed the museum was the continuing climax of the weekend. Its popularity was phenomenal and would probably have attracted patrons for 24 hours a day if we had kept it open. The directors (Steve Sands, chairmen) went beyond most museum concepts and staged a 19th century gunfight and educational tours of the Glen Nurseries (in cooperation with the Taber family).
Estimates of the crowds varied greatly. Your writer, whose very grits and shelter depends on his ability to see and record, made a safe estimate of 500 in the parking lot of Tom's Factory Outlet alone during the parade. Cursory counts later during our running around, multiplying the city blocks involved during the parade with the approximate 1,000 crowding each block, and combining and averaging figures from some of our estimators, we believe that our peak crowd was close to the Times-Union report of 7,000 to 8,000.
In addition, the beauty pageant and costume contest drew a safely estimated 500; Friday's street dance and entertainment pulled approximately 1200; Saturday's dance was the focal point for close to 2,000; and the Sunday service, Taber Drive dedication, and birthday party were the scenes of an additional 500.
As impressive as figures can be, they fade when compared to the smiles and laughes we met everywhere. The people were happy. If there was ever a time in our lifetimes that Baker County needed to laugh, it is now.
On behalf of all our workers and the town of Glen St. Mary, thank you for laughing.
Keep the spirit of the Centennial.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, October 8, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Okefenokee Swamp - A resumption of the series

After our interlude of the Glen Saint Mary Centennial, the return to the Okefenokee Series would seem almost anticlimactic if that great morass and its inhabitants were not so intriguing.

The Okefenokee is not a true swamp, but like its famous south Florida counterpart the Everglades, it is a giant broad river that flows slowly southward. Except for those periods of drought when the flow is curtailed or stopped, there is no stagnant water within its limits.

The Okefenokee is situated at an elevation which is over a hundred feet above sea level and is slightly higher to much higher than the surrounding land. It is the remains of part of the pre-historic lagoon sometimes known in geological circles as the Columbia Bay. When Trail Ridge, a series of pre-historic sand dunes, cut Columbia Bay off from the ocean and the land as it is geologically wont to do, rose, the great depression filled in and became not only the Okefenokee but also the numerous swamps, bays, and ponds of Baker, Columbia, Bradford, and Union Counties.

Okefenokee covers more than 600 square miles and was undoubtedly larger before man's encroachment with his multitudinous means of draining, many of which, such as road beds, ditches, clear-cutting, and farming, surely had to remove some of the natural moisture and therefore some of the swamp features.

Many of the earliest explorers and map makers believed the swamp was of greater extent than it actually was. Even as late as the nineteenth century some argued that the Okefenokee reached almost to the Flint River on the west. The Spanish sometimes had its northern edge nestled among the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Even today there is disagreement whether Baker and Columbia Counties' Gum Swamps, Pinhook and others should be considered part of the Okefenokee or if they are separate and independent bodies.

Some claim the old swamp is creeping southward just as the west coast of Florida is steadily easing down into the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, as the continental part of Georgia rises, it is pushing parts of Florida down and lifting the north edge of the Okefenokee tipping the swamp in the manner of a lifted saucer of water.

It is an observable fact that some abandoned Baker County farms within a mile or two of the recognized boundary of the swamp were until 40 or 50 years ago under cultivation but are often too marshy for the plow. The old Mack Raulerson/Gid Burnsed place had a yearly-used field until the thirties, but it is now filled with cypresses and, unless there is a drought, stands under water. McKinley Crews mentioned to this writer a few years ago that his and Dan'l's farm was not any longer a good place to dry root crops or to cure meat (humidity from the closely approaching swamp?).

We have heard tales that Cross Branch, a tributary of Moccasin Branch above Baxter, will, depending on flood conditions, flow backwards. Others have pooh-poohed the story saying that during flood times, there is No Cross Branch because it is lost in the waters that spread everywhere.

Florida Highway 2 and the Georgia Southern and Florida Railway utilizes an east-west ridge between the Okefenokee and Pinhook that has been in use as a game, trading, and settlers trail since before man's knowledge. The ridge was especially rich in refuse and burial mounds of the ancient peoples, but they have been looted and scattered by treasure hunters and the curious until they are but memories (wouldn't you just love to know that the cultural and social descendants of these ghoulish people will be doing that to your mother's grave in the future? Well, they will be).

From the 1820's this ridge was known variously as "the Old Train Trail" (not from the locomotive but from the train of wagons that used it), "the Settlers Trail", and "the Old Yarborough Trail." Travelers Rest, now called "Traveler", was a welcome stop for settlers, traders, and hunters from Spanish Days.

For a more detailed account of the beginnings of the Okefenokee we refer you to The Way It Was December 8, 15, and 22, 1977. We also refer you to our offerings of September 18 and November 13, 1975; January 29 and May 27, 1976; and May 4, 1978; for additional readings on the swamp and its people.

Next week, as promised, some of the people of the swamp.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, October 15, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS Gene Barber
People of the Okefenokee - The Indians

When a great schism occurred among the various tribes of the once loosely confederated Creek Indians, Polly Coppinger Powell Chose to take her young son Osceola and depart for Florida to dwell among the Miccasukies in the vicinity of the Okefenokee Swamp. Her husband, a white trader and a native of the British Isles, took the daughters and remained with the Tallassees and eventually removed with the Creeks to the trans-Mississippi territory.

It would be insulting to the memory of the great red patriot to treat him as no more than a subject for a paragraph or two, so we shall mention that the Swamp's first famous resident was Osceola and leave him for what we hope will be a greatly expanded column in the future.

Polly and Osceola remained in or near the Swamp for but a few years and were next found living in a hammock near the present Ocala. Before they left, however, another name remembered as infamous by many a resident of the northeast Florida-southeast Georgia area began cropping up. Very few descendants of the old swamp families have not listened around the fireplace on chilly fall evenings to tales of old Bowlegs (Bolech) and his band murdering their long ago ancestors. This writer's own great-great grandmother and great grandmother on his Garrett side were allegedly slaughtered by the enigmatic and seemingly ubiquitous Bowlegs ("Bowlegs" was a nickname, and there are no extant eyewitness accounts of the man being bowlegged).

Bolech's earliest known town was on the Suwannee River, but he later entered the relative safety of the Okefenokee from where he sallied forth on his bloody trips of vengeance among the white settlers.

Bolech gave up in 1838 and left the Swamp for the area west of Saint Augustine and south central Florida, but dallied along the way for a simple diversion - the scalping of Mrs. Jane Johns between the present Baldwin and the present Maxville.

Coacoochee or Wildcat also claimed credit for the Johns' incident. Ha had been a resident of the Okefenokee from about 1837 through about 1839. With the older Halpatter Tustenuggee (old Alligator, from whom Lake City's first name, Alligator Town - was taken) and Cotzar-Fixicochapeo (Mad Tiger), Wildcat terrorized north Florida from their headquarters in the Okefenokee.

Octiarche, a Creek chief who merited few comments in records of the times, was evidently a noted chief who tried to escape the white man's revenge and his fellow Indians' wrath toward his pacifism. He and a band of 60 men lived in the Okefenokee from 1836 until the end of the war in 1842.

Another important Creek personage who eluded most contempory journals and later history books was Ecouchatti (there are various spellings of his name). Ecouchatti and Osceola, according to some accounts, were cousins, but we must remember that Indians were like old-time Crackers in that they claimed cousins many timed removed.

Ecouchatti came to east Florida from somewhere near the Apalachicola River in the 1820 s, and he said that when he came to east Florida he was returning to the place of his birth. He took up residence in the Okefenokee and was one of the last of the Creeks and Seminoles to leave it.

He and his band are mostly remembered in Cracker legends as being alternatingly friendly and civilized, and then blood-thirsty and rapacious. It was Ecouchatti who murdered William Barber and some of his children on Trail Ridge in the summer of 1841 after having gained confidence of the family and associating with them since 1829.

The Widow Barber moved in 1842 to central Florida (the present counties of Marion, Polk, Hernando, Lake and finally Orange), but she was never free of Ecouchatti. He moved with her, and descendants all through central and south Florida tell the same story of an old Indian and a few of his band often stepping out of the woods and singing the taunt "Ecouchatti killed your daddy."

There are stories of other Indians in the Swamp-Bendoris, Seminole Billy, Tagger, and Cherokee Billy - and the writer's own great-great-great grandmother Mary Ann was one of those swamp people. When she gave her infant to Luke Sparkman she said, "Her name is Mary Ann, like mine....Now she won't have to run like us."

That young Coweta woman's great grandmother [grand daughter] told this writer A quarter of a century ago,"I seed the last of 'em (Indians) leave when I was a little girl. A'walking down the railroad track towards the east. They never come back. They wuldn't no more."

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BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, October 22, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Okefenokee -The whites move in....and out

The last of the belligerent Creeks and Seminoles were gone from the Okefenokee by 1841. A few scattered family groups lived in hovels in and around the swamp for several more years, but since they posed no threat to Anglo-American settlers the swamp began to experience its first permanent residents.

Among the earliest was the family of William Thomas Chesser (see BCP 29 January, 1976). Although no legal claims were made until the 1850's Mr. Chesser entered the swamp in 1842 and settled on an Island thereafter named for him. Descendents remained in possession of the island despite United States opposition for over a century.

The old Chessers were a pleasant but peculiar people, jealous of their privacy and not hesitant to stand up to federal and state governments against the rich man's war of secession. Two of the Chesser boys and a brother-in-law deserted the Confederate Army after a few grueling months and hid out in the fastness of the swamp for the duration of the war.

The Chessers lived a self-contained, self-sufficient life within the Okefenokee until after the War Between the States when life on the "outside" began to beckon to some. Before the twentieth century all but two of the boys had moved away. In 1958 the last of the Chessers - Tom, a grandson of William Thomas - left the old home place to the bears and unearthly quiet of the Okefenokee.

The quiet did not last long for now the Chesser farm is a living museum and host to thousands of visitors yearly.

Several miles west of Chesser Island and near one of the headwaters of the Suwannee River is the largest island in the swamp - Billy's Island. On this site lived the Dan Lee family closely related to the Taylor and Dowling families of Baker County. Dan Lee's father James laid claim to Billy's Island in the early 1850'sl, and Dan remained there to rear 14 children until after the turn of the century. All 14 with the exception of one were born on the island.

James constructed a double-pen log house that stood until the state of Georgia sold their land from under his son Dan.

The Hebard Cypress Company brought in its brand of civilization, and Billy's Island soon became a bustling little lumber town with a bank and a movie house. The whistles of tract trains disrupted the quiet and the Dan Lee family moved away with a settlement of $1,000 and relocated outside.

The last time this writer saw the Lee cemetery it was overgrown and, like the remains of the Hebard Company, was falling back into nature. The swamp always takes over.

Although never a resident of the swamp, the venerable Obadiah Barber was its most famous honorary citizen. Often called "the king of the Okefenokee," Mr. Barber lived up to his epithet by memorizing every trail and landmark in the swamp as well as holding the dubious honor of killing more bears than any other known hunter.

A powerful and large framed man even in his advanced age (he lived to be 92), Obadiah elicited tales of his strength and derring-do from all who knew him. The most wide spread was his encounter with a black bear.

The story goes that Mr. Barber met up with the large black bear in the woods and having no weapon with him and having no choice but to meet the unfriendly creature head on, Mr. Barber dispatched said bruin with his unaided and unarmed hands. The truth of the tale is, and this was the way Mr. Barber told it, he found a half-grown bear in his hog pen one night and with considerable difficulty killed the bear with a lighterd knot.

Many good stories could be told about Captain Harry Jackson and Surveyor John Hopkins and their attempts to drain the Okefenokee. The great hunters Lem Griffis and Will Cox deserve separate and more detailed accounts than can be given here. The timbermen and guides are stories by themselves, but we shall leave them for a brief introduction to the "Queen of Cowhouse."

The daughter of an Indian War officer, Mrs. Lydia (nee Smith) Stone Crews probably excites more ears than all the other swamp people combined. Over six feet tall and a hefty 200 pounds, Miss Lyddie could out-work, out figure, and outwit any man alive in her day.

She started life with one cow and one sow and died a millionairess. She towered above her first husband and out-aged her second by 42 years. From her Race Pond home Miss Lyddie ruled a timber and cattle ranch that stretched from deep within the Okefenokee through several counties.

Today they are all gone. The Okefenokee instead rings with the New Jersey twangs of canoers, is littered with redneck beer cans, and has none but temporary residents with Sears camping gear.

She's not the same swamp, but if we would leave her alone for but a few years she would show us how quickly she could become the old Okefenokee again.
Correction: Last week your writer said that he had talked with the great grandmother of a Creek Indian. Not so. He was trying to say "great granddaughter" and as he is often wont to do..just goofed.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, October 29, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The Okefenokee - Assorted legends, haints and boogers

It is natural that an area as mysterious as the Okefenokee should evoke tales to be related on chilly fall nights. The ancient Indians probably started it when they convinced the Spanish explorers that the dark and intriguing swamp was ringed with seven fortresses of gold and guarded by a race of giants. Later Indian residents of the lower southeast told Bartram and others that the swamp's interior was home to the "Daughters of the Sun."

DeSoto's chronicler of the famed Spanish explorer's trip into a swamp believed by many to be the Okefenokee said that the very trees of that enchanted place turned into warriors and that the skies rained arrows onto the helpless Spaniards. It has forever since toted the stigma of being an unfriendly, even hostile, place to intruders from "the outside."

Until very recently many of the old time neighbors of the Okefenokee claimed that none but a few charmed individuals could traverse the swamp, and they held them in almost reverence. Others swore that none but those possessing Indian blood in some measure in their veins could return alive from a trip far into the Okefenokee (a study of history has demonstrated that the Indians held many of the same or like attitudes and claimed no more ability to travel or know the Okefenokee than their white counterparts).

Although many "enlightened" souls have tried to explain them away, the traveling lights of the swamp remain implanted, even impregnated, in the minds of some older heads. The ambulatory luminescences are held by the older folk as being portents of death among the family or friends of the one visited by the lights. And they always have an example of such a demise to prove the legend.

And what nineteenth century kid was not visited by old RawHead-and-Bloody-Bones on Halloween (or anytime he, or she, was naughty)? He was a wonderful apparition who was so real that traces of his blood could be found next morning by the bravest who dared investigate the scene of the appearance. It was, we are certain, only a coincidence that this ancient Anglo-Saxon spook seemed to materialize after the beef slaughter made possible by the fall's first chill.

If old Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones was not enough to freeze the marrow of kids around old Okefenokee there were always the stories of the swamp's wildmen (always wild "men" and never "women"). The strangest part of the wildmen tales is that many of them are true. They were never the noble and magnificent savages as epitomized by Edgar Rice Burroughs but were miserable animalistic creatures who had either been turned out by their embarrassed or frightened families or who had wandered away from care.

Some could be clothed and modestly programmed to perform simple chores. It was said that in the nineteenth century one of two wild men who were found in the Okefenokee by a group of militia was taught to chop wood. He chopped wood so well and faithfully tha1 once when he was left alone with no instructions to stop, he completed his pile and began on the furniture and the porch.

Until very recent times, the wildman of Taylor supposedly startled a few residents of the south side of the swamp. A few clandestine trysts in the Taylor Cemetery were allegedly interrupted by the sudden appearances of a nude hirsute gentleman of unkempt and fearsome countenance making wild gestures and stridulous sounds.

In addition to the aforementioned spooks and creatures we have also heard of phantom bears, deer, and big cats, but this column feels its gentle readers should be informed of the most frightening boogers of all-the money hungry sonsa' guns who intend to rape a sister and neighbor of the Okefenokee and the power-and-money-mad public leeches who plan to let it happen.

Were you aware, dear readers, that your Federal Government (the one dependent on you, the voters and taxpayers, for existence) is rapidly slipping over to the side of the mining interests which will strip-mine about 18,000 acres of land near the Okefenokee called the Osceola Forest? That marvelous administration which so many of you fell all over yourselves to ensconce in Washington City last election admits it is preparing the way for a criminal-like assault on our Osceola. Your writer's mother preached to him for years that no matter what Halloween costume it wore, the Republican Party was the party of the rich and callous. If it toadies to big business on this count it's high time your writer and, we hope, his more intelligent readers re-think party affiliation.

And while we're at it, did you know that Alton Box Board Company of Jacksonville plans to alter and drain about 25 miles of the Okefenokee's largest arm-the Old Pinhook Swamp? For reference, check out the Gainesville Sun of 8 April, 1981. And if you can't believe then, call or write Mike Nowicki with the Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville (P.O. Box 4970, Jacksonville 32232).

People, you and your beloved swampland, Osceola Forest, water table (already dangerously low), hunting, and dignity as the public for whom the public lands are supposedly held in trust are hurting. Don't be nice. Call, better yet write and call, your congressman and senators (and the Death Valley kid) with not only an appeal to stop this nonsense and waste and indulgence of big business greed and whims, but also with an unequivocal promise to vote for their next opponent in the very next election if they don't begin to crawdad and to crawdad now. Nothing alters the philosophy, attitudes, and actions of a politician as much as the threat of slapping his or her hand out of the public till.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, November 5, 1881
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
It's time to mobilize - Against strip-mining in the Osceola

With fervent and fondest hopes this column waited for reactions to last week's effusion. We anticipated the subject of digging up the Osceola would incense readers in droves. But at best, reaction was minimal. It seems that those who would benefit most from the preservation of the Osceola Forest are the least concerned.

In fact, this column believes that once its writer's carcass is removed from the path of the first bulldozer the old Osceola Forest will be ultimately destroyed, and, public, with your attitude (or lack of it) you deserve it.

There are those of you who negatively believe that big government cannot be bucked. Contrary to your thinking a handful of North American Colonial Rebels tackled the then world's mightiest empire...and - won. A handful of Bolsheviks once toppled one of history's most authoritarian governments; and tiny Baker County's election returns once changed the course of American history by determining a national and state election.

Letters to the law-makers and executives of your government from you whose votes determine whether or not they remain in office are influential...but only if in great numbers. Don't use the excuse that you don't know what to say. "Do not permit strip mining in the Osceola Forest" is sufficient. Send your message to your Governor in Tallahassee and to your Senators in Washington (Lawson Chiles, 443 Russell Bldg. and Paula Hawkins, 1327 Dirksen Bldg., both zips 20510.) We also strongly urge an additional letter to President Reagan. No, he won't see your note, but if it arrives with a sufficient additional number he will be handed the cumulative message by his aides.

A few points to ponder: (1)When the mining boys talk about reclaiming the mined land they are not being entirely truthful with you. Their idea of reclamation is to gently slope the sides of the mined holes, grass it and plant a few trees that will tolerate almost sterile soil, and finally stock the ponds with fish. That, folks, is re-arranging the terrain and is definitely not reclamation.

True reclamation would be to fill in those holes with substructure, provide pockets for the storage and passage of groundwater, cover with a soil of like composition as before, reseed with exactly the same vegetation and restock with exactly the same kind and number of wildlife. Do you really think they are going to go to all that trouble and expense?

(2) When some of the local commercial minded boys with sugarplum visions begin to regale you with tales of increased revenues from local mining and decreased tax burdens on local residents and businesses, think long and hard - before you get caught up in their blind delights. First of all, there ain't no such think as increased economic activity decreasing taxes, increased economic activity, on the contrary, always creates a need for more services and therefore more taxes. Will the big boys pay those increased taxes? It's a dumbhole rationale to believe that those boys got to be rich and you remained poor by their paying their own way and yours too.

(3) More Jobs? How many of those companies are going to fire their current truck drivers and rehire here in Baker County? How many county resident strip mining experts with experience have you talked with lately?

At most, we can expect perhaps a few ladies to get clerical jobs in their local offices, if there are such, and maybe a few trash jobs will be available. These people will bring in their own major help, and when the job is through will move them out again. We'll be left-with nothing but a few big holes where we once walked, hunted, and gathered firewood.

Think about this thing, locals. Don't be sold a bill of rotten goods by a coalition of big government, big business, and local dreamers.

The forest is a long term revenue receiver and will be gathering revenue long after the 20 or 30 years of mining are over. It will be the necessary woodsy retreat for your grandkids long after the rest of our world is concreted over (the businessmen who plan to destroy your forest can afford to send their grandkids to distant woods for relaxation compliments of your destroyed forest).

Allow the forest to be sold out now for a temporary mess of pottage - and your grandkids will hunger forever for a woodsy world they were never allowed to experience.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, November 12, 1881
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
The turn of the Century

It has been this writer's observation and experience that the general public conceives history as an unbroken progressive chain from bad (in days of yore) to good(our time). The most cursory glance by even an amateur historian proves such is not the case but that history has its ups and downs, its cycles, its progressions and regressions.
When your writer drops historical tidbits on the coffee table - "Baker County used to have a college and a cultural elite and was nationally recognized for our horticultural achievements, etc." - his fellows half smile patronizingly and continue their conversation (without him) and launch into how wonderful it is that they, the current generation, were finally born to bring our county into the modern world.
Well, Sir, quoting from no less an authority than Memoirs of Florida Volume II by Rowland H. Rerick and edited by Francis R. Fleming, we offer some facts and figures on Baker County at the turn of the century.
"Baker County, area 538 square miles; population, 4,516,an increase from 1890 of 1,183 or 35.4 percent, is bounded on the north by Georgia, and comprises the upper St. Marys River region. The land along the river is high, rolling pine land, with clay sub-soil, averaging about three feet below the surface. The rest is flatwoods. In the northern part of the county the land is flatwoods and swamp. The Okefenokee Swamp forms the northeastern boundary. There are several lakes, the largest Olustee or Ocean Pond.
"The Seaboard Air Line railroad traverses the county from east to west, and the Atlantic, Valdosta and Western goes through the northeastern portion. Turpentine is a staple product and this industry is rapidly extending. The chief crops are sea island cotton, corn, oats, potatoes, sugar cane, field peas, and peanuts. Baker County is one of the very finest fruit growing sections of the state, producing the third largest crop of pears and standing next to the top in the list of peach growing counties. The quality and flavor of this fruit cannot be excelled. This county is especially adapted to raising hogs, chickens, geese, and turkeys; milch cows do well and large quantities of butter and dairy products are marketed. Macclenny is the county seat, and Sanderson, Olustee, and Taylor are the other principal towns. Glen St. Mary is the site of famous fruit nurseries. The Battle of Olustee or Ocean Pond was fought in this county during the civil war. There are 3,499 acres of land eligible for homestead entry."
Elsewhere in Memories of Florida we read that Baker County was also one of the states leaders in production of sweet potatoes, cane syrup sugar, field peas, pears, peaches (Baker was the second in production),grapes, and grape wine (do you suppose this was a disguised nice way of saying that our county was a leader in moonshine production?)
This 1902 writing states that Baker had just recently begun the growing of desirable cigar leaf tobacco of the Cuban and Sumatran varieties.
Of the citrus industry in this county Mr. Rerick writes:"...Citrus trifollata...imparts hardiness to the graft and encourages early bearing. In the grove of George L. Taber (sic), president of the States horticultural society, within eight miles of the Georgia state line, there was in sight in the fall of 1901 fully a thousand boxes of oranges, from trees that grew from the ground within twenty months after a severe freeze."
Baker also was among the major producers of goats, ducks, and turkeys, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mention is made that Baker's yellow pine stands were being depleted and that at the present rate of cutting most of the state would soon run out of trees. Conservation measures were called for. Eighty years ago and on into the decade of the twenties there were extensive tracts of Baker County with few or no trees of any kind, especially pines, victims of lack of foresight.
Mr. Rerick also wrote at great length on the state's phosphate resources and kept making remarks that began to edge dangerously close to Baker County, when he wrote of Columbia County's store of phosphate. Eighty years later he might include Baker's store but also reemphasize his warnings of depleting our forests as thousands of acres of Baker and Columbia will be dug up with no chance of that land ever growing another pine.
This column is deeply indebted to Mrs. Louise Mrosz for sharing with us her volume of Memoirs of Florida.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, November 19, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Data from some old maps
Your writer has long entertained a fascination for maps. Maps seem to have it all together, giving relationships of places to each other, echoing romantic tales of the past, and hinting of adventure to come.
This columnist's cousin, Ward Barnes, has been researching in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and has shared some of his findings in the form of maps with us.
An 1839 map of the Okifenokee (sic) Swamp by Lt. Robert M. McLane shows Ft. Moniac situated about half way between Traders Hill and the Suwannee River and on an army and settler route that completely circumscribed the swamp. On the west side was Breakfast Branch and on the east was the River Styx.
Immediately north of Ft. Moniac were several islands, only two named - Morris Island and Wolf Island. Morris Island seems to correspond with the currently named Soldier Camp Island. A Captain Morris had entered the swamp at Ft. Tompkins (apparently near the present Camp Cornealia), according to the map, and after a circuitous trip evidently camped and campaigned among those islands. This campaign could possibly be the historical side of the old timers' tales regarding the Indians being driven out of the swamp and through Baker County.
Other interesting points and differences on Lt. McLane's map are the depiction of a giant lake within the swamp's very center which is named Lake Loomis, and what is now called the CornHouse Section southwest of Traders Hill which was labeled Lower Cow House.
From circa 1750 comes a map of Georgia and parts of Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida drawn by His Majesty's cartographer, Emanuel Bowen. He places the Yamassee Indians in the area which would most likely be the present counties of Charlton (Georgia) and Baker (Florida). The Saint Marys River joins the Altamaha River in Mr. Bowen's map, and the two are shown as beginning in a large lake which is fed by four smaller streams, purported to be the Okefenokee.
Although Mr. Bowen was mistaken about the confluence of the Saint Mary's and the Altamaha, he was uncannily correct with the route above the Okefenokee that ran from what we can safely assume to be the area of Coleraine to the Mississippi River and with a forking branch into the Appalachian Mountains.
The southerly Lower Creek Nation road (all these were more properly known at the time as paths) lay from St. Augustine northward to west of the present Jacksonville and struck out west to a town at the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers. This route is just below the Okefenokee's south side streams, which might have mistakenly been the South and Middle Prongs of the St. Mary's River (remember, the man was working from others' reports).
It is this writer's opinion that the above described route lay through Baker County. Mr. Bowen is careful to distinguish this Creek Nation path from the more publicized Spanish Trail which ran just south of the county. He does this by depicting "the Road from St. Marks" (the Spanish Trail), also beginning on the west side of the St. Johns River, as a divaricate route from the afore-described Lower Creek Nations southerly road.
Mr. Bowen informs his map readers which Indian groups are friendly to whom, or "in amity with..." A true chauvinistic Englishman, he states that the Apalachee Indians were "destroyed in 1705 by the Creek Indians" rather than by the English and their Creek allies.
A map of east Florida from about 1822 is a combination of amazing accuracy (considering the lack of aerial photography)and inexcusable inaccuracies (a simple walk with a compass would have corrected many of them). The course of the Saint Mary's River is almost perfect, but heads of that stream extend fifty miles or more up into Georgia, and the Okefenokee is totally omitted. Big Creek (South Prong) runs incorrectly from the southeast and the Middle Prong runs from the north rather than from the west.
As did so many of the early maps of this area, the Middle Prong is shown as rising in Ocean Pond. On this map Ocean Pond and the Okefenokee have become confused as one and the resultant feature is sitting on the Florida-Georgia line. Trail Ridge also suffers an identity problem in that it has become part of the high backbone of the peninsula which in fact is many miles west of it.
Other close-by features familiar to us and which are included on this 160 year old map are Palestine or Dobson Lake (unnamed), New River, Brandy Creek(not "Branch" on this chart), Little Suwannee, and Black Creek Cowford is listed on the St. John's River, and the Kings Road crosses all the little streams which are known to us today - Boggy, Thomas, and Alligator Creeks.
A route is drawn forking from the King's Road at what is now known as the Rowe Settlement west of Hilliard in Nassau County. It crosses Mill Creek and touches the Saint Mary's River at Brandy Branch. From there it crosses the South Prong (Little St. Mary's) just south of the present McClenny, and continues to Bradford County's Alligator Creek and the Santa Fe River and Alachua, hence its name "the Alachua Trail."
The boundary separating the white settlements from the Indian lands ran approximately through the present Baldwin. Today's Baker County was entirely within those Indian lands.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, November 26, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Thanksgiving feasts of old
As we approach Thanksgiving, thoughts turn to (what else?)...Thanksgiving. And as others sit around being thankful, your writer spends a lot of time pondering upon food. He can't help it; he was reared that way. He came from two long lines of food appreciators, one via each parent (and the term is "food appreciators, not "gluttons" although your writer more correctly fits the latter).
On Thanksgiving there was always the turkey, a gigantic aromatic carcass that filled the oven and took two to lift and turn. She was certain to be bogged down in, and filled with, savory cornbread dressing; not your bland and slick lightbread dressing, but a substantial sage-and-onion-crowded concoction. And it wasn't "stuffing". It was, is, and evermore shall be "dressing."
Our families would have been embarrassed if the turkey had been the sole meat course. In combinations or all, there would also be fresh pork roast, a cured ham, maybe a beef or venison roast, and chicken in all its delightful and creative Cracker forms.
Besides chicken fried (without all the secret spices, herbs, and seasonings that cover up the taste of the bird), there was chicken and rice, or perlow, and chicken and dumplings. The writer's families' dumplings were not your insipid puffballs that went to gooey pieces with every stir, but could be better described as thick noodles.
Enough eggs were added to plain flour to make a crumbly yellow mass. Sufficient spicy greasy broth from the stewed hen was added to make a workable paste; Heavily floured, rolled thin, and cut into the cook's favorite shapes and sizes, the dumplings were dropped into boiling broth to create a delectable dish almost too good for Queen Elizabeth herself. The longer they simmered the tastier they were, and they could stand re-heating and stirring for days (but they never made it into the second day at our house).
Every esculent among the local vegetable scene was on our table(our kids were not taught that there were foods, especially vegetables, that they did not like). Frost-nipped collards (everybody complained about the odor but didn't let that slow down their appetites for them), barely wilted young mustard, sweet tater souffle'(known in generations before as "mudgeon"), yellow squash lightly stewed with butter or bacon grease and onions, and either late fresh peas and green beans or from the summer's canning sessions.
Ambrosia was a messy chore worth all the effort and slung fruit juice. Everything was fresh, if possible, except for the bright bottled cherries, even the coconut. It was always served in the largest and prettiest glass bowl and, your writer believes, always given a place of honor on the table or sideboard second only to the turkey. We remember the annual discourse on how it was fruit salad if the coconut was missing but became ambrosia with the addition of coconut. We don't know where those definitions came from, but they were good enough for us.
The dessert table was sinful. Pies of mincemeat (occasionally the mince would even be homemade), pumpkin (usually both the heavily spiced and milder types), sweet potato (probably not the world's most perfect food, but close to it), stackbread (more often served in summer when the jellies were fresh but sometimes making it to the holiday tables),pecan (truly the most glutton inspiring of them all), chocolate, and lemon (the last two, of course, don't get to anybody's tables now except via the frozen prepared kind or from a box. We assume there has been a federal court halt to their being made from basic ingredients).
A few of us remember the old fashioned red devil's food that was not only welcomed by our taste buds but amazed us that it had no artificial red food coloring in it. This food creation has also been relegated to memory and no longer graces our tables.
As certain as the presence at a holiday table of the relative who never brought anything but always hauled food away be the dishpanful was the fruitcake..indubitably the South's most overrated food item. The writer's grandmother made the worst of them all. It took days and nights to cut up the cloying sweet things that she assured us was candied fruit. There was day and night feeding the wood stove for even temperature, a few days to ripen it, and finally the big day when the first slice was cut...a black smelly, icky-tasting slab of something that everybody whooped and hollered about, but we suspect they did the same as your writer...found some place to spit it.
We admit we did not spend much time being concerned about the starving masses while we gorged (after all, we had to toted our one item of canned goods to the church for the poor folk's baskets). Without boasting, the family knew we had helped feed our unfortunate neighbors here in the county when times had been rougher.
Eating had always been our one big luxury, and on Thanksgiving we indulged..and we were thankful.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, December 3, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS Gene Barber
Looking ahead at Olustee
Annually risking the accusations of "unreconstructed rebel", we once again remind our readers of the approaching anniversary of the 1864 Federal Florida Campaign. We know it better as the Battle of Ocean Pond or Olustee.
For the past few years the Florida Department of Natural Resources has sponsored the very popular re-enactment of the conflict on the weekend nearest the battle's date of February twentieth. Our alert and forward thinking neighbors in Columbia County have performed admirably in staging a ceremonial and festive complement to the reenactment.
Although your writer strongly disapproves of several historians' and state brochure writers' habit of placing the battle site in Columbia County, he firmly believes that the battle celebration belongs to Lake City. This attitude is based on that community's prior interest in, and imaginative utilization of, the event.
However, much of the pre-and-post battle activities belong to Baker County. From the moment the first recorded United States troops crossed Trail Ridge into this county several days prior to the battle and until the last stragglers of that vanquished and sad army recrossed the Ridge to safely, it was primarily a campaign on Baker County soil.
It would be almost a century before Baker County's population would match the numbers of Federal troops encamped at the present day McClenny. On the twentieth of February, 1864, the size of the opposing armies was almost the current population of the county. It is clearly the largest and most important event in this county's history and among the history-changing events of the state.
Why commemorate the battle at all? This column suggests it was an event of potential lessons to be learned, and those lessons have not been learned yet. We offer some of the unusual aspects of the Federal Florida Campaign of 1864.
A dangerous precedent could have been set when President Lincoln blatantly ignored the accepted chain of command and directed the commanding officer to proceed with the Florida Campaign. Whether the event was good or bad, right or wrong, it was basically wrong for a president to personally interfere in military matters, and the American people must hope and guard against their supreme leader ever again possessing that power. Some might know how to use it, but others will only create disasters like Olustee and the Bay of Pigs.
Not wishing to take away any of Lincoln's luster (Heaven knows his good points will always outweigh his weak ones), but Olustee can also remind his worshippers that he was primarily a politician and that he was influenced to order the Florida Campaign by a handful of petty politicians from Florida who sought after-the-war spoils for themselves. They presented a convincing argument that a Florida victory would be sure to return him to office.
Eventually, enough interest in Olustee by way of the annual re-enactment will be certain to bring those dusty letters out of the National Archives regarding the hundreds of U.S. soldiers and some score or so of Confederates buried at the battle site, and those men's graves will someday be acknowledged and marked.
Strangely, the commanding officer of the losing army was regular army, trained, and professional, whereas the commander of the winning troops was a part time, non-professional, gentleman soldier. In addition, the men of the losing side were mostly trained military men of the Regular U.S. Army, but the victorious men were largely untrained militia soldiers. A great majority of the losers believed in what they were doing and had a fair idea of what it was all about, but the winners were mostly opposed to secession and few were aware of what secession meant But fighting for home and family can make a great difference.
Olustee can also be a reminder of how a nation can sometimes treat, or mis-treat, its most loyal citizens. After General Seymour had led his men on a tough twenty mile march, with them with the sun in their eyes, fought against men who blended with the pines, and dragged twenty miles in retreat, he was castigated by the U.S. press and his military superiors. He died an ex-patriate in Italy.
Finegan, a gentleman but not a professional soldier, won the battle, prevented the severing of Florida from the Confederacy, and secured a great morale boost for the Confederacy in the last days of her existence but was immediately set upon by the press and military of the South for not pursuing his victory to the ultimate destruction of the Yankee troops. He lost his Fernandina home and business and died quietly and unsung in DeLand.
Baker County's annual participation in the Battle reenactment would be an effective vehicle for renewing ties between the county and its western step-child Olustee. The people of the community of Olustee have much more to offer their county than votes at election time. Let's get reacquainted with them. Let them get reacquainted with the rest of us. We are all one.
The Baker County Chamber of Commerce has begun to investigate ways in which this county can become involved with the annual re-enactment. This column heartily endorses that effort and recommends that our readers seek them out with encouragement and offers of assistance.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, December 10, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Christmas 1981
In other years this column has devoted its seasonal effusions to thoughts of holidays past. However, for the sake of posterity we wish to record our observations of this current Christmas.
The first big shopping day for Christmas in Macclenny (Saturday, December fifth) was sunny-bright, crisp, and breezy. Even with the bank closed, a healthy sized throng was milling and rolling through town. Mr. Varnes and his crew had the light pole decorations in place just in time.
The beer cans and other litter in the parking lots had assumed an extra festive glow and sparkle. From nearby music boxes (actually radios and other sound systems in 4 x 4's and TransAms) wafted the sweet strains of "I Love My Truck" and "He Stopped Loving Her Today."
The permanent (and, Lord, so very attractive) yard sales were in place early and were joined by a myriad others filling every unused drive and vacant lot until the entire town put one in mind of one gigantic flea market. Happy shoppers were rummaging and plundering through other people's throwaways in a manner most reminiscent of oriental rug merchants on bazaar day.
Driving past the tasteful displays we took note of a TV ceramic night light in the form of the three wise men, genuine hand painted velvet pictures of Elvis, a nativity scene including as worshippers Santa Claus and Jerry Falwell, used drug paraphernalia, half empty bottles of after shave lotions and the world's most exciting fragrances, plastic flower arrangements, racks of shapeless dresses, a tattered couch this writer had hauled to the dump last week, and other delightful discards and rejects from dozens of now happier homes.
One enterprising and nervous lad displayed a set of shiny new hub caps (oops, we mean "wheelcovers". Another gentleman was hawking the January issue of Hustler magazine at a greatly inflated price (Caveat emptor! That particular page giving international attention to McClenny's choice sample of female pulchritude might be missing).
There were the usual bake sales and benefit candy sellers, most with outstretched palms and intimidating gibes.
Beyond the din and cluster stood the rows of empty store spaces, once scenes of happy Saturday bustling.
In the grocery stores the deprived and indigent purchased microwavable pastries with food stamps and held up the line while arguing with the clerk about their rights to also use the stamps for beer and kitty litter. Your columnist, in the true spirit of Christmas, waited patiently and abjectly with his three-cans-of-generic-brand-soup-for-a-dollar. One young swinger solved his problem; he bought chewing gum with a food stamp and immediately purchased cigarettes with his change (so help us!).
Returning home we discovered fresh stumps of two more cedars cut from our yard. We lose a few more each year at this joyous time (we secretly hope Santa Claus refuses to visit those Christmas tree purloiners).
We heard the annual holiday moans from all sides about inflation and frayed nerves. Nobody seemed to understand that all this madness is voluntary. No one seemed to know that even if we have slipped into this snowballing Yuletide silliness by grasping at anything we consider to be pleasurable and pain-erasing in our very fast, very commercial world...we can stop.
For the remainder of this season in our columns we shall remind our readers of gentler Christmases of the past, but until then we wish all a very merry neurotic holiday.

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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, December 17, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
To a mellow Christmas
A kind reader responded to our last week's column, and we herewith reproduce it in its entirety: "Dear Mr. Barber, as a new resident in the county I depend on The Press to keep me informed on local events and on your column to gain an insight into the people and history I've moved into. I enjoy most of your writing, but I wonder if your cynicism might not be influencing me toward a wrong impression. Do you ever have anything nice to say about anything? Would it be possible for you to say something more mellow during the Christmas season? Sincerely, One-In Love-With Baker-County."
Seems like we've been taken to task. It just so happens, Ms. One-In Etc., that a bit of seasonal nostalgic fluff was intended for this week and next. Thanks for the lead.

Dear Ms. One-In-Love-With-Baker County,
I was once in love with our county too (still love it). I had a long-standing love affair with Baker County, and it was fanned anew each year about this time.
I loved the church Christmas trees. They were not an item but a time, and they were very nondenominational, almost genuinely ecumenical at times. In those days most of our people were Christian first and denominational second, or third. Something about Christmas made us more tolerant then. Each church scheduled its Christmas Tree Program to avoid conflicting with the others.
I liked the last minute gift buying in downtown McClenny, the good-natured jostle in the dimestores, "Merry Christmas's" you could believe. I thrilled at the two strings of colored lights over US 90 at McClenny's city limits, the privilege of making Christmas cards for "the boys overseas", and riding into Jacksonville to see the rich folks' decorations.
I now realize how narrow, shallow, and chauvinistic I was when as a child I wondered if people in Baldwin and Sanderson knew how to celebrate Christmas in the enlightened manner of us McClennians.
There were Christmas baskets for the poor, gathered community-wide (the baskets not the poor. Well, actually, the poor were too). I now understand that those we call "poor" in our county today would have been mighty rich back then. The Sunday School teachers eyed my offered items for the baskets as being greatly less than necessary, but I knew crayons and books were needed almost as much as groceries by some people.
Christmas programs at the schools...those delightful mixtures (and mix-ups) of Christianity and paganism. They were such wonderful vehicles for our creativity when it came to devising the star of Bethlehem. The sheperds always wore their daddies' bathrobes and had redbugs for weeks from their Spanish moss beards. We always came home with the wrong towels that were our headdresses. I'll never forget the year one kid almost had a stroke when the teacher announced that Jesus was a Jew...he could have sworn, he said, that Jesus was Holiness.
We visited in those days. And it was absolutely permissible to offer guests something to drink other than booze. We sang around the parlor organ and made peanut brittle. There were hayrides and caroling, apple juice and wienie roasts.
A tree up as long as two weeks before Christmas was evidence of a weird Person (notice how we get them up the day after Thanksgiving now?). a hold over from the days when Santa did the trimming on Christmas Eve. Nobody but a few arty persons used anything but multicolored strings of lights. Mrs. Nellie Day used all blue in the Suwannee Store.
The Lions Club had a party for the poor kids, and the Earle Theatre treated the town's children to a show.
Since Christmas was limited to only about two weeks out of the year (that included the week between Christmas and New Years)and gift giving was limited to Christmas , birthdays , and Mothers Day, it meant more to us. We looked forward to that holiday then because it didn't happen all year.
Yes, Ms. One-In-Etc., I can get mellow about Christmas, but I fear the mishandling and abuse of a great and beautiful holiday leaves me a bit cold at times.
This year I shall tend to my visiting, stoke up a fire, wrap up in memories, and share a cup of eggnog with ol' Santa. Bet I'll have a nicer Christmas than you.

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THE BAKER COUNTRY PRESS, Thursday December 24, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
After 'The Day After'
Do doubt some were, as was your columnist, taken in by all the hype and hoopla about Sunday evening's ABC television docu-drama The Day After. No doubt, almost all of you, as did your columnist, dozed through most of it.
This Is not to say we thought the subject trite; it was just a poor movie.
Actually, your columnist had no intention of watching (he eschews depressing themes of any kind). He accepted an invitation to be a part of an audience at a panel discussion about the movie's subject that was to be televised the night after, and he had little choice but to watch.
The Ed McCullers-produced, Ernie Mastroianni-hosted program was greatly more effective than the greatly touted TV movie. Your columnist left the studio feeling much more informed (and perhaps a bit more frightened)than ten of those ABC movies could have done for him.
Of course, your columnist found himself in trouble right off the bat when he and his partner walked into the studio. The nice young lady with clipboard in hand eyed them with suspicion when she could not find their names among the invited guests. The nice young rabbi behind us who jokingly suggested that we looked like trouble-makers did not alleviate the nice young lady's fears.
After settling down in the auditorium and being introduced to the situation of being televised, we heard Mr. Mastroianni's welcome and further instructions. When he alluded to the docu-drama's poor quality, we McClenny folk broke into wild applause.
We seemed to be the only ones to do so.
We shall mention right here that our partner was the inimitable and affable Ms. Jemsa Whizdum (yes, readers, we think she has overed her recent poor health and other stuff and will be back with us real soon). Ms. Whizdum's primary question was, "If the bomb hits McClenny and there is a rush on the grocery stores here, will they give double coupons?"
Your columnist endeavored to keep her from the microphone. The hosts seemed quite relieved also.
Referring back to paragraph two, we reiterate...the subject. Is of life-or-death-importance. However, we contend that movies such as The Day After do little to keep that in the public's mind. It does, on the contrary, make the subject, to some weird folks, almost laughable.
This corner feels that more locally produced programs such as the one Monday night, and with great emphasis on the very probable effects of a nuclear bomb (forget the megatons stuff; just talk about bombs) on very definite places such as Yulee, Middleburg, the Beaches, Baldwin, and...McClenny, will prompt more concern about seeking out information on protecting ourselves as possible survivors.
Let's face it, we have the nuclear arsenals, and either side feels that it would be a fool to toss them away while the other(seen as a bully by the other side...and don't start calling this writer a Communist; he is just talking straight stuff) keeps theirs for some fool to accidentally push a button and send off. Nobody is going to disarm. And, very likely, nobody among the big powers is stupid enough to use the, bombs and missiles, but accidents will happen.
This column thinks our best bet is (1) learn all the possible effects and protection possible, (2) prepare ourselves individually as dictated by number 1, (3) begin to return congress persons and senate persons home who either rattle swords (or bombs and missiles) or who act so puerile as to say, "Here now, we've tossed our weapons away. Won't you do the same?"
In discussions such as these, some folks express surprise that your columnist is not, as they think they deduce, against nuclear weapons. Well, hear it now and hear it right...your columnist IS against nuclear weapons, and he doesn't like guns, bows and arrows, or slingshots. But they are all here, and we might as well learn how to live with them and use them properly.
There is no better place to begin than at home with those kids of yours who "never do anything wrong" (on our way home from the nuclear weapons panel discussion program, we saw a kid trying to shoot a stray dog with a bow and arrow). The powers that be will probably hold off destroying the world for a generation or two (don't get too complacent though). If they do, perhaps we can raise up a new generation with more sense than ours or of that we're raising, and they will solve the problem for future ones.
Killing is not nice. It should not be condoned. If should not be viewed as entertainment (as in chainsaw murder movies). It should not be accepted as sport when the hunt is for nothing but pleasure and hunt is one-sided. It should not be gloated over when the victim (animal, bird, or whatever) had no chance to begin with.
Killing is not nice. It should be discouraged.
Happy Thanksgiving.

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THE BAKER COUNTRY PRESS, Thursday December 31, 1981
THE WAY IT WAS-Gene Barber
Potpourri of the year 1981
This column wishes to add to the tedium and redundancy of the news media usual recaps of the old year with its own list of the year's top events.
Starting off the year was the seemingly interminable freezing weather. Your columnist's plants actually froze in his bedroom. MaNature later counter-balanced with a summer containing an unprecedented number of above 100 degrees days. Chickens died by the tens of thousands, and everybody was asked to conserve water in the midst of an all-Florida drought (hardly anybody took it seriously).
Arsonists got lots of their own peculiar thrills by keeping the woods afire in our part of the state. Schools were closed, traffic delayed, and tourism dropped in neighboring areas. Many buildings were burned nationally and several people killed by the same type of flame-happy idiots.
Good news in January, locally and everywhere: return of the hostages.
The Glen Saint Mary Town Council entered the year upset over a fence on town property and continued to attract unwanted and unflattering publicity throughout the year in heated debates and unfortunate accusations.
We discovered that the county's proposed airport wasn't likely to get off the ground, so to speak, since the hoped-for property was not for sale. In fact, the owners said they learned of interest in their property through the newspapers.
A fine gentleman Lonnie Jones was honored after 36 years with the Macclenny Post Office. R.A. "Buzzy" Green made a name for himself as Circuit Court Judge handing out stiff justice to child support dodgers and sex offenders. He was later transferred (we the public will frequently cryout for law and order, but we won't tolerate it when directed at us or ours.
Mrs. Mary Raulerson, Mr. Theron Groves, and Mr. John J. DuFour, children of Confederate Veterans, were given lifetime honorary memberships in the Baker County Historical Society. Carol Baker, an outstanding local artist was judged first in the prestigious arts auction for Jacksonville's Stereo 90 and Channel 7.
Other Baker Countians who experienced the life of fame and the beginning of success: Brenda (nee Bones) Ridge'll, Fashion Coordinator and Clothes Manager for Jacksonville's Jones College Fashion Show; Nancy Furr, a member of the Florida School of the Arts Pop Ensemble; and James "the Giant" Croft, hitting the big time in the Grand Ol' Opry.
Protest against strip mining the Osceola Forest...heartwarming coalition of sweet little ol' ladies, Audubon folks, and good ol' boys plus a lot of other genuinely concerned people of no particular category. The local town meeting was most successful in informing the locals and the entire Jacksonville area of all the facts. This column believes that was the prime turning point, but the job isn't finished..stay alert.
The county was saddened, shocked, and frightened by the shooting in our neighboring community of Baldwin of a State Trooper and a resident of Baldwin. Your columnist was later told that as he had been taking his daily walk, the convict was sharing the same pasture as an escape route.
Macclenny's Last Man Club, composed of gentlemen who grew up in old McClenny, finally relented and invited their ladies to join them for their 1981 get together
Musician Carolyn Adams penned a song about the county, and it was introduced at the Baker County Arts Festival (mistakenly labeled "the First". The Arts Fest was the latest and most successful of several held on the streets of McClenny since the 1960's.
There was a little flak and flap regarding BCHS seniors tippling on a trip to Disneyworld. Why this made news now, we can't understand; we know personally that high school seniors have been sneaking booze on trips for over 30 years. Other high school graduates made us proud. Terry Szanto, for instance, became our first graduate of a U.S. military academy.
We were a bit closer to the Nimitz disaster when we learned that John Peden, the husband of a Baker County woman, Virginia Ruise, was aboard. Another tragedy, but almost of the horror movie sort, was the death by fireants of a woman passing through the county.
The County Rescue Program became an item unwanted by anybody. We don't think that had anything to do with Rescue 32 being stolen at NEFSH. We feel it's time to stop thinking of Rescue as a bean bag and get the matter settled before we lose it (and one of us reading, or writing, this needs it).
Heated races for council seats in McClenny and Glen ended with some upsets. One of Glen's races was settled by a flip of a coin, thus raising not a few eyebrows. Once the dust had settled, the McClenny Police Department was abolished, and soon the sheriff assumed duties in the city. A long, bitter, tiresome, and expensive feud was finally ended.
1981 seemed to be the year of tragedy and heartbreak for the county. The Raynor-Fox plane crash was one those sad disasters we thought we only read about happening to other people in other places...never to our own.
We know it is most dangerous to single out any death as being more significant than any other, but we must mention the untimely death of our friend (and indeed mankind's friend) Iris Parish. Only the Supreme Being is aware of the scope and depth of the woman's contributions to this area and her concern for suffering (You were an unsung heroine, Parish, and if I could sing, I'd hum a few bars just for you. Thank You).
For this writer, the Glen Centennial was clearly the big good news. An estimated 8,000 to10,000 in attendance and an economy enrichment of over $100,000.00 (your writer, for instance made 27 cents an hour staging the celebration) placed it with the County Centennial of 1961 and the Battle of Olustee in 1864 as being the three biggest events of the county's history.
The second County Fair was bigger and better than the first. Now they need more room. 1981 marked the first time the Fair staged its own parade (there were four within a month's time.
As the year ended, locally, the Citizens Bank ended a very long tradition closing on Thursday and being open on Saturday; progress was being made toward restoring the old county courthouse-library; the county was neck deep in garbage fees arguments; and McClenny gained national notoriety as being the home of a candid (very candid) photo queen.

Biggest Bores Of The Year.
By Gene Barber
Feud between the departments of Sheriff and city police
Cronkite leaving CBS Evening News
Baseball strike
Diana's wedding dress and selection of hats
Haig and Allen's feud
Allen and the Japanese magazines
Brooke Shields
The 1981 Florida Legislature
The adolescent Barron-childers feud
All and anything connected to Peter Abbott
The Jax Tea Men

Most Over Rated, Manipulated, and drained news stories of the year:

British riots
Hunger strike
Baseball strike
Diana's wedding dress and selection of hats
Air controllers strike
AWACS sale
Alexander Haig
Allen and the Japanese magazine
The Barnett-King law suit
Brooke Shields' nude pictures at 10
Lt. Comdr Allen Spicer's alleged crash
All and anything connected to Peter Abbott
The Jax Tea Men
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