American Beach Roots

 

American Beach Roots: Kingsley, Sammis, and Lewis

by Alec Newell



Strawberry Plantation House at Clifton Point - photo by Newell

 

Photo by Newell

The extended family of Zephaniah Kingsley, Anna Jai, and their descendants have been major players  in shaping the history of Northeast Florida during three colonial periods, American territorial times, Florida's early statehood, and on into the 20th Century.  Between Lake George and the St. Mary's River, the fingerprints they left seem to be everywhere.  Most of us are familiar with the story of how the slave trader Zepheniah Kingsley bought a 13 year old "African princess"  Anna Madgigine Jai in Cuba, and brought her back to his Laurel Grove Plantation in what is now Orange Park, Florida.  The couple produced four children, and Zephaniah never waivered in his acknowledgement of Anna as his wife.

Headstone next to Anna Kingsley's
 unmarked grave - photo by Newell

Later Anna, as a freed woman of color, would own her own slaves, plantation property, and live at various other family residences along the Lower St. Johns River.  These properties included: Mandarin (later owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe),  Kingsley Plantation (Ft. George Island), Chesterfield (now part of the Jacksonville University Campus), Floral Bluff (where the Arlington Road meets the river), and Strawberry Plantation (now Arlington Bluff or Clifton Point) where Anna is buried.  Probably less well known, is the Kingsley connection to the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and American Beach.

In 1830, Zepheniah  married his youngest daughter, Mary Elizabeth Kingsley, to "Colonel" or "Captain" John S. Sammis, a white New York shipbuilder with practical experience in milling lumber.  At the time of his marriage Sammis had not only been chief overseer at Kingsley's White Oak Plantation, but had also been managing planting, lumber production, cotton ginning, and a grits milling operation for the Richard Family who owned Strawberry Mills and the 6,000 acre Strawberry Plantation at what is now Clifton Point.  The mills were some of the first water operated machines of their kind in the area and were powered by same Strawberry Creek that crosses under Cesery Blvd. and the Arlington Road today.



The red star indicates the location of John Sammis' plantation house - photo by Newell





A. L. Lewis 1865-1947

John Sammis acquired Strawberry Plantation and the mills from the Richard family following the death of Francis Richard Jr. in 1839.  Surviving headstones at the Clifton Cemetery indicate that members of the mixed-race, extended  Kingsley families (Baxter and Sammis) were buried there from 1841 until 1870.  In 1850 John Sammis had a large plantation house built on the property that is still in use today as a private residence.  The Clifton Cemetery is not far from that house, and Anna Kingsley lies in an unmarked grave next to the headstone of Emile V. Sammis, her grandson.  Many of the original grave markers were made of cedar or cypress and have long since returned to the elements.  In 1884 Mary Francis Sammis, the octaroon granddaughter of John Sammis and Mary Kingsley Sammis, married Abraham Lincoln Lewis.  Lewis, the son of former slaves, would become a founding President of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and Florida's first black millionaire.

Motto:  "Recreation and Relaxation Without Humiliation"

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, access to public beaches by "persons of color" had been severely limited.  In 1935, A.L. Lewis bought a 200 acre tract of ocean front land on the south end of Amelia Island, that would become American Beach.   Lewis wanted to not only provide recreational perks for his black employees, but to also establish a private, all black, beach-front community where African Americans could afford to buy land and build homes.  In the years that followed, the community flourished.  It quickly became a prime recreational destination.  In time, it also became a unique retirement settlement and a magnet  for black celebrities and entertainers like Cab Calloway, Zora Neal Hurston, Ray Charles, Hank Aaron, Joe Louis, Ossie Davis, and James Brown.

Next year the community will be celebrating its 80th anniversary.  The current residents of American Beach are understandably proud of their unbroken connection to the cultural legacy which A. L. Lewis had originally envisioned for them.



Afro-American Life Insurance Company
101 East Union St. - photo by Newell

 

Hurricane Dora

50 Years Ago: Hurricane Dora Remembered

by Alec Newell



10th Street and Oceanfront Atlantic Beach, in the wake of Hurricane Dora

In September of 1964, I was 15 years old.  My family lived on 12th Street in Atlantic Beach.  We had experienced hurricanes before, but Dora would leave us with our most memorable impressions.  During a lull in that storm our whole family decided to walk down to the beach to see for ourselves what was happening.  There was an eight foot high curved seawall along the beach that had been designed to redirect the force of a storm surge back onto itself, but it had not been designed to withstand the kind of pounding we witnessed that day.  Waves were surging over the seawall and the force of the current was washing away the sand behind it.   As the erosion accelerated, it exposed the heavy metal cables that anchored the seawall back to the ocean front yards it was supposed to be protecting.

The Bull House



At the foot of 11th Street, between the Old Bull House and the house just south of it, there was a 20 ft. high palm tree growing above the level of the seawall.  Several waves surged over that tree forcing the palm fronds at the top of that tree back down over its trunk.  The waves were a heavy dark grey that matched the color of the sky and there was a strong current moving debris in the surf north with a force I'd never seen before.  I remember seeing another full grown palm tree with bright green fronds float by us at an amazing clip indicating an even more serious erosion problem somewhere to the south of us.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel pool with covered promenade, before Dora

We walked south another block to the foot of 10th Street to get a better look at the Atlantic Beach Hotel and its pier which were also taking a beating.  The hotel had a giant swimming pool that was flanked by a two story frame building  and a stucco masonry bathhouse, just south of where we were standing.  In front of the swimming pool there was a wide veranda with a planked promenade and a row of heavy Adirondack beach chairs that faced the ocean.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the air, after Dora 1964

As waves crashed over the seawall, we watched the roof of the veranda collapse. Surging waves pushed floating debris from the veranda and some of the Adirondack chairs back into the swimming pool.  What didn't settle in the pool was dragged back over the seawall and washed out to sea when the waves retreated.  The pilings under the pier began to wobble, lean, then fail, taking whole sections of lumber into the heavy surf.  Just weeks before, some of the boys who regularly surfed the Atlantic Beach Pier had been out testing their mettle in the giant waves that had accompanied Hurricane Cleo earlier that season, but no one went out during Dora.

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the beach 1964

Being a teenager and not a property owner, I remember being mostly exhilarated by the event.  My mother had filled white plastic bleach bottles with drinking water; the bathtub had been filled with water for washing dishes and flushing toilets.  We had a battery operated transistor radio and flashlights. Our concrete block house felt secure against the wind and rain, and we played cards or board games at night by the light of a Coleman lantern that was normally used for night fishing in better weather.  The whole experience was like being on an extended time-out from school and the real world.

The damage to our house was minimal.  We lost a few roofing shingles, and there were downed palm fronds and tree limbs all over our yard, but we had experienced no real flooding.  Standing water covered most of the yard and all of 12th Street, giving the visual impression that our house sat on a small island surrounded by a vast moat with palm trees growing out of it.  We had been lucky.

Damage along Old A-1-A in South Ponte Vedra Beach



It wasn't until days later, riding around in a car, that we began to appreciate how much real damage the hurricane had inflicted on other parts of the Beach.  Trees and power lines were down everywhere, sea walls had been breached and homes and businesses were severely damaged or gone.  Some ocean front home owners had had junked cars towed to their homes and rolled into the trenches behind their seawalls in an effort to slow the erosion which was undermining their house foundations.  It was days before the storm water began to  recede, weeks before the mountains of yard trash could be removed, months  to repair, and years to replace some of the damaged buildings.  President Lyndon B. Johnson and his entourage personally toured the Jacksonville Beaches and declared Northeast Florida a national disaster area.  The property damage left in the wake of Hurricane Dora was estimated to be 280 million dollars in 1964, or the equivalent of 2.07 billion dollars in today's money.


 

Florida Lobster








Photo by Newell

 

 Showing My Age

by

Alec Newell

 

Back in late March of this year, after what seemed like an endless winter, I fished about 30 miles off-shore, near Blackmar's Reef, with a young crew that included Matt Evitt, Mike Conte, and divers Tim Cullen and Mike Shipe.  We had a great day, with about a dozen pink snappers, our bag limit of B-liners (vermillion snapper) to 19 inches, a very nice haul of large spiny lobsters, a sheephead, several triggerfish, a large mangrove snapper, half a dozen large red snapper that, of course, had to be thrown back, and some lion fish that I let the divers clean.

 

There are some huge mounted langousta or spiny lobsters on the wall of the Marine Science Center in Mayport, but not being a scuba diver, I tend to forget how big the lobsters here actually get.  I used to free dive for "bugs" or spiny lobsters in the Keys, but the last time I was there in 1972,  you could still order sea turtle steaks from the menu at Sid and Roxy's Green Turtle Inn on Islamorada.  According to Tennessee Williams' Memoirs, the turtle steaks and drinks there were excellent;  he looked forward to eating sea turtle, and (mostly) drinking there whenever he was staying at his house in Key West.

I never ate at the Green Turtle, but remember the restaurant, with its chalkboard menu out front, as a landmark when I stayed at Marathon.  We'd fish and dive Marathon for lobster by day, then head down to Key West to drink at Sloppy Joe's Bar at night.  I remember seeing old eight by ten inch black and white photographs, on Sloppy Joe's walls,  of  1930's and 40's era celebrities.  One was of a very nicely dressed Johnny Weissmuller perched atop a  barstool, wearing a double breasted tropical suit, with an open necked sport shirt.  He is mugging grandly for the camera but his unfocused gaze betrays his extreme intoxication.  The picture offered an entirely new perspective on the childhood image I had of Tarzan.

photo by Newell

Sloppy Joe's always reminded me of Pete's Bar.  Ernest Hemingway had hoisted a few in both places, but he is more often associated with Sloppy Joe's, where he'd left some personal affects and a trunk full of old manuscripts parked in a back room of the bar.  Shortly after his death, the trunk was opened and found to contain an unfinished manuscript for what would later become Islands in the Stream.

Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, had the manuscript edited, added to, and posthumously published (1970).  The book was later adapted to a movie starring George C. Scott (1977) and became the inspiration for a Bee Gees' song (1983) that was originally performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.  Islands in the Stream became a block buster enterprise which earned a financial bonanza for the Hemingway estate.

But I'm not here to count the Hemingways' money or to digress over Tennessee Williams' culinary habits; this is a fish story, or rather a lobster story, and we all know what fish stories are about: "mine's bigger than yours is," right?  So I'll just cut to the chase, and since a picture's worth a thousand words, here they are.

Photo by Newell

 

His Eye is on the Sparrow

by Alec Newell

 

Mayport Presbyterian Church, photo by Newell



Not long after moving to Mayport, I began to notice that if I'd look out the kitchen windows just about sunrise or sunset, there would often be a covey of quail under my grape arbor.  I had mentioned this to an old fisherman in the neighborhood named Stoddard Andreu who, in turn, told me about his recipe for quail purlieu, which had been something of a Mayport legacy from a time when villagers often ate quail, dove, pigeons, and even winter robins, when hard times warranted it. "You get me a mess o' quail Capt'n," Stoddard offered, "an' I'll show you how to make purlieu."

The grape arbor photo by Newell

About that same time, a teenaged Eddie Thompson stopped by the yard and allowed that he not only knew about the quail, but had a wire mesh quail trap that I could borrow if I wanted to use it.  The bargain was struck.  We'd set the trap under the grape arbor, bait it with chicken scratch feed, and if we trapped a mess of quail, we'd contact Stoddard for further instruction.  That was on a Saturday evening, and I had planned to attend services at Presbyterian Church, across the street from my house, the next morning.

I slept late the next morning, but when I got up, noticed that there was a trap full of frantic quail under my grape arbor.  I was ecstatic!  I'd soon be tasting quail purlieu, but in the mean time, I had just enough time to get dressed and make it to church.  The birds would just have to wait until the service was over.

By the time I'd crossed the street, I noticed Miss Blanche Williams, one of the grand dames of the church, regarding the grape arbor with a disapproving scowl, "Mr. Newell, I see you've got some quail trapped over there in your yard.  Are those your quail?"

"Well, good morning Miss Blanche, yes I do.  Aren't they beautiful?"

"Yes they are, Mr. Newell, but are those your quail?"

"Well yes, since those quail are in my trap, I expect that they are my quail."

"I don't think so, those look like Mr. Coopers quail to me."

"Mr. Cooper's quail?"

"Yes, he whistles for them every evening.  He calls them up into his back yard where he feeds them.  I think those are Mr. Cooper's quail in your trap, and he will be very upset if they go missing.  And just what are you planning to do with Mr. Cooper's quail?"

"Well I, ah, my brother-in-law, well, he has these bird dogs he takes hunting, retrievers, and I thought that he might like to borrow these quail for training his dogs, and that we, ah he, could maybe just let them go whenever he, ah we, were done with them."

Miss Blanch never uttered another syllable.  She just turned on her heel and huffed up the steps, and into the church to occupy her usual pew at the far eastern side of the building.

I gave it a few seconds, then eased on into the church to take a seat behind hers on the far west side of the building.  I slunk down in the pew then looked up to the hymn board on the wall behind the alter. The very first hymn on the list for the day's service was number 624.  I opened the hymnal to the corresponding page and there it was, hymn number 624, "His Eye is on the Sparrow," (...and I know He's watching me).

It was probably at that very second, that a great miracle began to take shape right there in the Mayport Presbyterian Church;  for sure as Pharaoh freed Moses and the Israelites from their bondage, within mere minutes of the benediction, those birds were free and on their way, because in Mayport, just as in Ole Egypt, that could only have been accomplished by the hand of Divine Providence.  Ask anyone.

USS Saratoga

Of Gamecocks and Aircraft Carriers:

The USS Saratoga 20 Years Ago

by Alec Newell

USS Saratoga (CV 60)

 

The Decommissioning Ceremony for the USS Saratoga was held on August 20, 1994.  The following article was written earlier that same year.

This week the USS Saratoga will steam into Mayport from her final deployment and be decommissioned later this year.  It will be the end of a career that has spanned the administrations of nine U. S. Presidents, and five decades of distinguished military service.  It will also mark the end if a long affiliation that I have had with the ship since before moving to Mayport Village in 1976.

My house lies directly west of "B" Pier on the Naval Station, in a direct line with the old St. Johns Lighthouse.  From my yard I can throw a stone and hit the abandoned St. Johns Lighthouse or read the hull numbers on the ships in the basin.  From the signal bridge of the Saratoga, you can look through the stationary binoculars called 'big eyes" and see the chickens in my yard flying up to the roost poles in their fly pens; and every evening at sundown, the chickens can hear taps being played as the ships lower their flags during "colors."
 

 USS Saratoga commemorative decommissioning ball cap

When a carrier comes in after a long deployment, it is very much like the circus coming to town: balloons, banners, and streamers.  Tugboats toot, bands play, wives, children, and sweethearts, all wave and throw kisses to the sailors that line the flight deck in their dress uniforms.  The mooring lines go over, the brows go up, and for the next two hours it seems that every taxi cab and car in Duval County is pouring out of the Navy base, choking the Mayport Road with traffic.



USS Saratoga's Homecoming after Operation Desert Storm in 1991

 

Days before her arrival, the Mayport Road is festooned with billboard messages, more banners, placards, yellow ribbons and hand- made signs welcoming home crew members of the carrier and the ships from her carrier group entourage.  Television cameras are always on hand to record young sailors embracing parents, kissing wives, or holding infants that were born while they were away at sea.  What the narrow focus of the camera cannot convey is the enormous economic bonanza that impacts a community when a floating city of 5,000 people or more, flush with cash and high spirits, is dumped into a middle sized suburban community of bars, motels, restaurants, and movie theaters.  Local merchants and fast food restaurants have been quietly beefing up their product inventories and personnel schedules for days, to accommodate the financial windfall that a carrier homecoming brings.

Within hours local shipyards are busy setting up work compounds in hangar bays of the ship and a frenzied work pace begins, often 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to meet the stringent demands of rigid deployment schedules.  The temporary shipyard compounds  resemble a miniature industrial complex of office trailers, modular shops, tool rooms, time clocks, water coolers, fax machines, phone lines, and electrical networks that are completely independent of the ship's own power and communication systems.



When you spend hundreds, or even thousands of hours working on a ship over the course of years, that ship begins to take on an almost flesh and blood quality of its own.  Some you like better than others.  Often two ships of the same class, like identical twins, can have radically different personalities.  The steel itself seems to magically hold, or give at critical moments on one ship, while you can expect sheared bolts and cracked welds from the twin.  The Saratoga, though stressed with metal fatigue from age, and cluttered with wire-ways for communications and weapon systems that she was not designed to accommodate, she has always had a good work ethic, and has always shown the game heart of a game cock which has always been her mascot.

 



When she limped back into port after Operation Desert Storm, you could feel the exhaustion and the pride.  The non-skid on her flight deck was worn bare for the length of two football fields, and was red with rust.  Only two of her four original catapults were fully operational, and with several of her boilers shot, her propulsion systems had been taxed to the limit.  In an eight month, history making, extended deployment, she had launched 2,626 long distance combat sorties, and had delivered 4.3 million pounds of ordinance in her mission to liberate Kuwait.  The only air to air "kill" of a Mig jet by a U.S. Navy pilot was in a FA-18, launched from the Saratoga.

I am not an overly sentimental person, but I will probably miss the bustle and activity in the hangar bays, with the noise and exhaust from the forklifts and high-reaches, or the aggravation of countless fire and security drills.  I will miss seeing the insigniae of flight squadrons above the divisional doors and the hand painted mural of a gray gamecock that crows defiantly in Hangar Bay One.  I will think about the heavy, chrome plated gamecocks that top the ceremonial rope stanchions on the forward quarterdeck, and I will wonder what has become of them.

 

Mayport Festival History

by Alec Newell

 

Mayport Village has been hosting outdoor entertainments since the first Mayport and All that Jazz Festival in 1980.   The Jazz Festival of 1981 was easily the largest festival the neighborhood ever participated in.  It was a one-day free concert that featured Dizzy Gillespie, Della Reese, Urbie Green, Art Blakey, and others, who performed on an outdoor stage near the ferry slip.  With an estimated 40,000 celebrants on hand that day, the one-day event had an enormous impact on the Mayport economy.  Singleton's Restaurant reckoned its canned beer sales for that day alone, not in six-packs or cases, but in pallets. 

 

Dizzie Gillespie and his signature horn

If memory serves, there was an aerial photograph in the Sunday paper, showing cars backed up from the Navy's back gate (Gate 5) past the Little Jetties, to the Sherman Creek Bridge on A-1-A.  Friends of mine, anticipating the large crowds, had decided that my house would be a good place to spent the night, and some pitched tents.  We dug an outdoor barbeque pit and roasted two whole 30 pound kingfish and a couple bags of oysters that Saturday.  We could look down Broad Street, and see the stage.  The free nonstop music lasted for 13 hours, and was compared to Woodstock by a Times-Union staff writer.  I don't know how long my party lasted, but I do remember stepping over several prone houseguests the next morning.  The event was so successful that it was transferred to Metropolitan Park the following year to better accommodate the large turnout.

Later that decade, Sandra Tuttle, Mayport's  Mother Teresa, organized several "reunions," that were planned to coincide with the traditional homecoming of the shrimp fleet in October.  They were held at the boat ramp near the old dock master's house. Younger members of the old village families returned to share old photos, rehear old stories, and catch up on family news over traditional Minorcan dishes and local seafood.

In the mid 1990's a Mayport - Ft. George Island, "New Ferry Seafood Festival" was organized to celebrate having the Jean Ribault  put into service.  The ship had been built by the new construction division of Atlantic Marine on Ft. George Island.  The festival locations straddled both sides of the St. Johns River, with the newly built Jean Ribault providing free transportation back and forth between the two locations.  When funding for the ferry became a political hot potato, several more festivals were organized to "save" the ferry.

In 2012 a French Commemorative Festival was organized to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Jean Ribault's historic landing in Mayport.  Two wooden replicas of 16th Century French sailing vessels and the French Ambassador were on hand to represent the government of France;  and Gaetan Ribault, a direct line descendant of the French Explorer, travelled from France to represent the Ribault Family.

About 15 years ago, a small festival and parade was organized as a fund-raiser for the Mayport Village Civic Association.  According to local tradition, Beanie Andreu, because of his starring role in Mule Skinner Blues, had been tapped to be the Grand Marshall of the parade that year.  Beanie, a retired merchant marine, shrimper, and aspiring celebrity, had been more than happy to oblige.  But Beanie's recent fame had not been without its pitfalls.  After years of sobriety, Beanie had a major slip from the water wagon and woke up the morning of the parade as the guest of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office lock-up.  Beanie managed to make a last minute arrival in time for the parade in the back of a squad car, chauffeured by two of Jacksonville's finest, with the blue lights flashing.

Missile Mail

The Mayport Experiment: Guided Missiles for Mail delivery?
by
Alec Newell 

 

  

USS Barbero, firing a guided missile at Mayport

I recently stumbled across a little known chapter in local Beaches history when someone forwarded me an e-Bay ad for a postal envelope with a special cancellation mark commemorating the use of a guided missile to deliver mail to Naval Station Mayport.  In the 1959 Cold War era of the Eisenhower Administration, you could buy Air Mail stamps that, for a few extra cents, would guarantee your letter would travel "Via Air" and shave a day or two off its standard delivery time.  But using guided missiles from U.S. warships to deliver mail?  It sounds more like science fiction ripped from the pages of a Buck Rogers comic book than a serious concept in mail delivery.



Ike receiving Missile Mail from the USPS

Among stamp collectors there is a sub group group of who specialize in "covers."  They collect whole envelopes because the dated postmarks on them can often be more valuable than the stamp itself.  In November of 2010, the postal cover and letter pictured  below were offered for sale on e-Bay, with a minimum starting bid of US $2000.





The U.S. Postal Service's first, and only, experiment with "Missile Mail" occurred June 8, 1959, off the Atlantic Coast of North Florida, near Naval Station Mayport.  A special payload of V.I.P. mail, intended mostly for government officials, was loaded aboard a Regulus I missile and put to sea aboard the USS Barbero (SSG-317).  The Barbero was a refitted submarine that had seen combat service during World War II.  The missile was launched at sea, and recovered at what was then called the Mayport Naval Auxiliary Air Station. The mail was then driven to the Post Office in Jacksonville, for sorting and routing.  The official first class postage rate then, was 4 cents for domestic, and 8 cents for foreign deliveries.

Post card offered on e-Bay Feb. 2014, for minimum bid US $18.99

 



back side of the post card, note illustration (left)



 





Guided missile with postal payload at Mayport

The 3000 letters had received their historic postmarks before being loaded aboard the Barbero.  The missile was launched from international waters approximately 100 miles off shore, manually guided by the crew from on board the submarine, and followed by a couple of chase planes to the landing strip at Mayport.  It was met by an entourage of military and civilian dignitaries.  Among them was Postmaster General Allen E. Summerfield, who was on hand to personally remove the mail boxes from a compartment originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead.



U.S. Postmaster General Allen E. Summerfield, unloading Missile Mail

The letters were sent out to Heads of State, and Postmasters General all over the world, to generate a Cold War buzz about our ability to launch nuclear capable missiles from submarines, anywhere on the planet.  The letter addressed to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute remains in the National Postal Museum's collections.  The rest have become valuable prizes for collectors.